He felt that if he could put a name to it, he could control it. Transgressive association? That had the right sound, but it was too clinical to give him a handle on it. Perhaps the medical label didn’t matter anyway. The only thing that mattered was the effect it had on him, and on his job.
The simplest things could trigger it-a bar of music, a face, some small Swiss dog crapping on the sidewalk, or the smell of automobile exhaust. Never children, though, which was strange even to him. Only the indirect fragments of his earlier life gave him that punch in the gut, and when he found himself in a freezing Zürich phone booth calling Brooklyn, he wasn’t even sure what had triggered it. All he knew was that he had lucked out: No one answered. An early breakfast somewhere, perhaps. Then the machine picked up. Their two voices: a minor cacophony of female tones, laughing, asking him to please leave a message.
He hung up.
No matter the name, it was a dangerous impulse. On its own, it was nothing. An impulsive-maybe compulsive-call to a home that’s no longer home, on a gray Sunday afternoon, is fine. When he peered through the booth’s scratched glass at the idling white van on Bellerivestrasse, however, the danger became apparent. Three men waited inside that van, wondering why he’d asked them to stop here, when they were on their way to rob an art museum.
Some might not even think to ask the question, because when life moves so quickly looking back turns into a baffling roll call of moral decisions. Other answers, and you’d be somewhere else. In Brooklyn, perhaps, dealing with Sunday papers and advertising supplements, distractedly listening to your wife’s summary of the arts pages and your daughter’s critique of the morning’s television programming. Yet the question returned as it had so many other times over the last three months: How did I end up here?
The first rule of Tourism is to not let it ruin you, because it can. Easily. The rootless existence, keeping simultaneous jobs straight in your head, showing no empathy when the job requires none, and especially that unstoppable forward movement.
Yet that bastard quality of Tourism, the movement, is also a virtue. It leaves no time for questions that do not directly relate to your survival. This moment was no exception. So he pushed his way out, jogged through the stinging cold, and climbed into the passenger seat. Giuseppe, the pimply, skinny Italian behind the wheel, was chewing a piece of Orbit, freshening the air they all breathed, while Radovan and Stefan, both big men, squatted in the empty rear on a makeshift wooden bench, staring at him.
With these men, the lingua franca was German, so he said, “Gehen.”
Giuseppe drove on.
Each Tourist develops his own personal techniques to keep from drowning-verse recitation, breathing exercises, self-injury, mathematical problems, music. This Tourist had once carried an iPod religiously, but he’d given it to his wife as a reconciliation gift, and now he was left with only his musical memories. As they rolled past the bare, craggy winter trees and homes of Seefeld, the southern neighborhood stretching alongside Lake Zürich, he hummed a half-forgotten tune from his eighties childhood, wondering how other Tourists dealt with the anxiety of separation from their families. A stupid thought; he was the only Tourist with a family. Then they turned the next corner, and Radovan interrupted his anxiety with a single statement. “My mother has cancer.”
Giuseppe continued driving in his safe way, and Stefan used a rag to wipe excess oil off of the Beretta he’d picked up in a Hamburg market last week. In the passenger seat, the man they knew as Mr. Winter-who toured under the name Sebastian Hall but was known to his distant family as Milo Weaver-glanced back at the broad Serb, whose thick, pale arms were crossed over his stomach, gloved fists kneading his ribs. “I’m sorry to hear that. We all are.”
“I’m not trying to jinx anything,” Radovan went on, his German muddied by a thick Belgrade accent. “I just had to say something before we did this. You know. In case I don’t have a chance later.”
“Sure. We get it.”
Dutifully, Giuseppe and Stefan muttered their agreement.
“Is it treatable?” Milo Weaver asked.
Radovan looked confused, crammed in between Stefan and a pile of deflated burlap bags. “It’s in the stomach. Spread too far. I’m going to have her checked out in Vienna, but the doctor seems to know what he’s talking about.”
“You never know,” Giuseppe said as he turned onto another tree-lined street.
“Sure,” Stefan agreed, then went back to his gun, lest he say something wrong.
“You’re going to be with us on this?” Milo asked, because it was his responsibility to ask such things.
“Anger helps me focus.”
Milo went through the details with them again. It was a simple enough plan, one that depended less on its mechanics than on the element of surprise. Each man knew his role, but Radovan-might he take out his personal troubles on some poor museum guard? He was, after all, the one with a gun. “Remember, there’s no need for casualties.”
They all knew this, if only because he had repeated it continually over the last week. It had quickly become a joke, that Mr. Winter was their Tante Winter, their old aunt keeping them out of trouble. The truth was that he had been through nearly three months of jobs they knew nothing about, none of which had claimed bystanders. He didn’t want these recruits ruining his streak.
This was job number eight. It was still early enough in his return to Tourism that he could keep track, but late enough for him to wonder, and worry, about why all the jobs had been so damned easy.
Number four, December 2007. The whiny voice of Owen Mendel, acting director of Tourism, spoke through his Nokia: Please, go to Istanbul and withdraw fifteen thousand euros from the Interbank under the name Charles Little. You’ll find the passport and account number at the hotel. Fly to London, and in the Chase Manhattan at 125 London Wall open an account with that money. Same name. Make sure customs doesn’t find the cash. Think you can handle it?
You don’t ask why because that’s not a Tourist’s prerogative. Simply believe that it’s all for the best, that the whiny voice on the line is the Voice of God.
Job two, November 2007: There’s a woman in Stockholm. Sigfreid Larsson. Two esses. She’s at the Grand Hôtel on Blasieholmshammen. She’s expecting you. Buy her and yourself a ticket to Moscow and make sure she gets to 12 Trubnaya ulica by the eighteenth. Got that?
Larsson, a sixty-year-old professor of international relations, was shocked but flattered by all the fuss made over her.
Jobs for children; jobs for third-rank embassy staff.
Number five, January 2008: Now this one is sensitive. Name’s Lorenzo Peroni, high-scale arms dealer based in Rome. I’ll text you the details. He’s meeting with a South Korean buyer named Pak Jin Myung in Montenegro. I want you on top of him from when he leaves his apartment on the eighth until he returns on the fifteenth. No, don’t worry about mikes, we’ve taken care of that. Just keep up the visual, hone your camera work.
As it turned out, Pak Jin Myung was no arms buyer but one of Peroni’s many mistresses. The resulting photographs were more appropriate for English tabloids.
So it went. One more impotent surveillance in Vienna, the order to mail a sealed manila envelope from Berlin to a Theodor Wartmüller in Munich, a one-day Paris surveillance, and a single murder, at the beginning of the month. That order had been sent by text message:
L: George Whitehead. Consider dangerous. In Marseille for week starting Thurs.
George Whitehead, patriarch of a London crime family, looked about seventy, though he was in fact closer to eighty. No bullets were required, just a single push in the hotel steam room. His head cracked against the damp wall planks; the concussion knocked him out for life.
It hardly even felt like murder.
Others might have been pleased by the ease and inconsequence of these assignments. However, Milo Weaver-or Sebastian Hall or Mr. Winter-could not relax, because the ease and inconsequence meant only one thing: They were onto him. They knew, or they suspected, that his loyalties did not lie entirely with them.
Now this, another test. Get some money together. Ideally, twenty million, but if you can only get five or ten we’ll understand.
Dollars?
Yes, dollars. You have a problem with that?
Stefan, perhaps because of nerves, began to tell them about a beautiful girl he knew in Monte Carlo, a dancer who earned an excellent living having sex with animals, which Stefan believed to be the secret French vice. That, too, ruined Milo’s inner sound track, and he told the German to shut up. “Give Radovan the gun.”
Stefan handed it over.
Giuseppe said, “Just about there.”
Milo checked his watch; it was nearly four thirty, a half hour before closing time.
Giuseppe drove through an open gate and across gravel to where three Swiss cars were parked in front of the museum, a nineteenth-century villa once owned by Emil Georg Bührle, a German-born industrialist who had earned part of his fortune selling arms to Fascist Spain and the Third Reich. He left the van idling. A middle-aged couple left the museum, and behind their van, beyond the stone wall, more couples moved along the sidewalk on Sunday outings.
“The four I said, okay? They’re close to the front. We don’t have time to shop around.”
“Ja, Tante,” Stefan said as they stretched black ski masks over their heads. Giuseppe remained behind while the others climbed out. Radovan clutched the Beretta against his thigh, and the three men crunched over gravel to the entrance.
When scouting this and four other museums the previous week, Milo had noted the lack of real security, as if it had never occurred to those responsible for the E. G. Bührle Museum that someone might love art a little too much, or just want some easy money. There were two guards in the front, retired Swiss policemen who didn’t even carry sidearms. It was Radovan’s job to neutralize them, and he did so with gusto, shouting in his heavy accent for them to get on the floor as he waved his pistol around. Perhaps sensing that this was a desperate man, they sank immediately.
Stefan pulled the ticket clerk out from behind her counter and forced her down beside the guards as Milo checked for patrons. There were only two left-an elderly couple in the first room. They stared at him, baffled.
While Radovan kept watch over his prisoners, Milo and Stefan took out their wire cutters. The first snip set off a piercing alarm, but this was expected. Ten minutes, he had figured, minimum. A Monet, a van Gogh, a Cézanne, and a Degas.
With their heavy glass covers, the paintings were unwieldy, so it took both of them to hustle each to the van, while Radovan paced menacingly. Seven minutes into it, Milo tapped Radovan’s shoulder. They all withdrew.
Giuseppe laid on the gas.
This, of course, was the easy part. Four paintings worth over a hundred and sixty million dollars in less than ten minutes. No corpses, no injuries, no mistakes. Face masks, the minimum of conversation, and a white van out of town.
Giuseppe kept to the speed limit while behind him Radovan and Stefan slipped the burlap bags over the paintings and chatted about details of the job, the way they might discuss pretty girls they’d met on vacation. The expressions on the guards’ faces, the ticket clerk’s admirably shaped ass, the old couple’s strange air of ease as they watched the robbery take place. Then, without warning, Stefan leaned forward and vomited.
He apologized, but they’d all been through enough jobs to know there was often one person whose nerves finally took control and emptied him completely. There was no shame in it.
Giuseppe got them out of Zürich proper by a confusing sequence of turns he had charted out beforehand. Only once they’d reached the eastward road to Tobelhof did the rigor relax, and for a brief minute they had a peaceful view of the forest rising toward the peak of Zürichberg. A moment of naiveté, as if this peace could be theirs. They passed through Tobelhof’s scattered farms, and by the time they reached the urban landscape of Gockhausen, the feeling was gone.
They reentered the forest on the far side of the town and took a left onto an unused dirt road where, a half mile in, a VW van and a Mercedes waited for them in a clearing. They got out and stretched. Radovan gave a Serbian curse of glee-“Jebute!”-before they transferred the paintings to the VW. Giuseppe doused the interior of their white van with a canister of gasoline.
Milo removed a soft leather briefcase from the trunk of the Mercedes. Inside was six hundred thousand dollars’ worth of used euro bills in small denominations, divided into three Tesco grocery bags. If asked, he would have explained that they’d been liberated from a drug dealer in Nice, but no one asked. He distributed the bags and shook their hands. He thanked them for their good work, and each told him to call whenever he had another job. Milo wished Radovan luck with his mother. “It took a long time,” said Radovan, “but I’ve finally got my priorities straight. This money will pay for whatever she needs.”
“You sound like a good son.”
“I am,” he said without a hint of modesty. “As soon as a man loses touch with family, he might as well put a bullet in his own head.”
Milo gave him an appreciative smile, then shook his hand, but Radovan wouldn’t let go.
“You know, Tante, I don’t really like Americans. Not since they bombed my hometown. But you-you, I like.”
Milo wasn’t sure how to take that. “What makes you think I’m American?”
A big grin filled Radovan’s face. It was a familiar one, that knowing and vaguely condescending smile prevalent among Balkan men. “Let’s just say your German accent is lousy.”
“Maybe I’m English. Or Canadian.”
A laugh popped from Radovan’s mouth, and he slapped Milo’s arm. “No, you’re American, all right. But I won’t hold it against you.” He reached into his pocket and handed over Milo’s worn passport. He winked. “Sorry, but I like to know who I’m working with. Tschüss.”
As Milo watched the Serb proudly join the others at the car, he thought how lucky they both were. Had he lifted something that could have connected Milo to his real name-not this Sebastian Hall passport-Radovan wouldn’t have made it out of this forest, and he didn’t feel up to killing anyone today.
Once they were gone, he reversed the VW a few more yards away, then walked back and lit the van’s upholstery with his Zippo, leaving the doors open. He lit a Davidoff for himself and waited until the red flames had spread, turning blue as they began to melt the dash, filling the interior with poisonous smoke. He put the cigarette out on his heel, tossed it into the growing inferno, then returned to the VW and drove away.
Farther south on the A2, which would eventually take him to Milan, his phone vibrated on the passenger seat. He didn’t need to see PRIVATE NUMBER on the screen to know who it was.
However, the voice was not Owen Mendel’s. It was deep yet airy, like an educated man still clutching onto his progressive youth. The code, though, was the same.
“Riverrun, past Eve.”
“And Adam’s,” he answered. “Who are you?”
“New, that’s what. Alan Drummond. And you, I believe, are Sebastian Hall.”
“What happened to Mendel?”
“Temporary placement, until they found me. Rest assured that I’m here to stay.”
“Okay.” Milo paused. “This isn’t just a call of introduction, is it?”
“Please. I don’t do those. I’m right to business.”
“Then let’s get to it.”
This Alan Drummond, his new Voice of God, told him to go to Berlin, to the Hotel Hansablick. “The instructions are waiting for you.”
“You know I’m in the middle of something.”
“I should hope you are. Just take a few days.”
“No clues?”
“I think you’ll find it self-explanatory.”
Two hours later, in a suburb north of Lugano, he transferred the paintings to a garage he’d rented the week before and secured with a combination lock. Because of their weight, it took a while. There was a single fluorescent light overhead, and in its surreal glow he took a moment to examine the paintings uncovered. It was a shame, because according to the plan he’d cobbled together only two of them would return to the world. He lit another Davidoff and tried to decide which would survive and which would not, but couldn’t. Count Ludovic Lepic and his two daughters gazed back accusingly because they believed they would never be seen again, and perhaps that was true. Degas had immortalized them in oils nearly a century and a half ago, and at some point a master of industry had picked them up and his estate had hung them for all to see. Next week, with a bit of gasoline and this Zippo, they, or two others, would vanish, as if they had never been.
He locked up and drove on, leaving the Swiss southern Alps for the industrial Lombardy plains. The air outside his window was cold and clean, but in the late-night Italian darkness he could see nothing of the peaks behind him. It was past midnight when he reached the wet, tungsten-bright streets of Milan, and on Viale Papiniano he wiped down and abandoned the VW. He caught an hour-long night train to Bergamo, then a shuttle bus to Orio al Serio Airport, which had an eight-thirty flight to Berlin, the earliest one in the region. He’d left his last tote bag in a Zürich Dumpster before joining his crew for the job, and now carried only what filled his pockets-his pills, Davidoffs, passports, cash and cards, cell phone, and a single keyless key ring with a small remote. He boarded with his Sebastian Hall passport and took a seat over the wing beside a tired teenaged boy. He popped two Dexedrine to stay awake. Once they were in the air, the boy said, “Vacation.”
“Excuse me?”
The teen, an Italian with impeccable English, grinned. “The song you’re humming. ‘Vacation,’ by the Go-Go’s.” He was clearly proud of his knowledge of a song forgotten by most people by the time he was born.
“So it is,” Milo admitted. Then, despite the drugs rattling his nerves and the flash of those answering-machine voices laughing in his head, he passed out.
They’d called in early November to ask if he’d be interested in returning to the field. “Your record is excellent, you know.” That had been Owen Mendel, full of baffled praise-baffled because he didn’t know why this excellent Tourist, who’d even moved on to six years of administration, had been kicked off the Company payroll. Mendel had obviously been left with a severely edited file. “It’s up to you, of course, but you know what kind of budgeting pressure we’re under these days. If we could get some experienced people like you in the field, we just might make it.”
A nice sell. The Company wasn’t doing him a favor; he was the Good Samaritan.
He’d known, from the moment he heard Owen Mendel’s voice, exactly what would follow. Yevgeny had prepared him. “You’ll say yes, of course, and after some refresher course you’ll be vetted by the jobs you do. A few weeks. We’ll make no contact during the probationary period.”
A “few weeks” had grown into three months. Even the great Yevgeny Primakov, secret ear of the United Nations, hadn’t figured on that. Nor had he figured on the kind of job that Alan Drummond, Mendel’s successor, would assign him in Berlin: a final, impossible vetting.
It was five days after the Zürich job, a little before nine on Friday morning, and he stood on the cold, gusty grounds in front of the Berlin Cathedral. He was caught in the funk of a muddy post-drunk anticipation, trying hard not to look like a vagrant, but it was difficult. All night he’d sought solace in a vodka-based honey liqueur called Bärenfang, but it had only added to his sickness. The rumble of rush-hour traffic rolled toward him; a tour bus with Augsburg plates swerved onto Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse and gasped to a stop not far away.
A white spongy envelope had awaited him, and once he’d gotten it from the Hansablick clerk in exchange for a tip, he’d taken it with him on a long walk, a subway ride, and another walk to a dusty, nondescript pension in Friedrichshain, a bohemian district of what used to be called East Berlin.
Two photographs, from different angles, of a pretty olive-skinned girl, blond from a bottle. Girl: fifteen years old. Adriana Stanescu, only child of Andrei and Rada Stanescu, Moldovan immigrants. On the reverse of one photo:
L0 2/15
Kill the child, and make the body disappear. He had until the end of the week.
He’d burned the instructions Monday, and since then shadowed the Stanescus, examining the details of their lives. Rada Stanescu worked at the Imperial Tobacco factory, while her husband, Andrei, drove under the banner of Alligator Taxi GmbH most evenings. They lived in Kreuzberg among Turkish families and gentrifying Germans, not far south of Milo’s pension.
What of the girl, Adriana, who’d been scheduled to die? He’d followed her to the Lina-Morgenstern High School, where her friends were a mix of German and Turkish students. He’d found nothing out of the ordinary.
Don’t ask-another Tourism rule. If a girl is to be killed, then she is to be killed. Action is its own reason.
He began walking to the cathedral’s ticket office, where the Bavarians from the bus were beating their hands, sending up clouds of breath, waiting for the window to open.
Each morning, Andrei Stanescu dropped off his daughter one block from her school. Why one block? Because (and he read this from her expressions, from the shame in her father’s face) Adriana was embarrassed that her father was a taxi driver. Between the drop-off point and school, along Gneisenaustrasse, were six apartment-building entrances and the always-open car-sized entrance to a courtyard. In the afternoon, she returned to him along that same route, always alone. The courtyard, then, was where it would have to happen. If it happened at all.
Every Tourist has a past, and Alan Drummond knew all about those two things that, had the budgets been more favorable, would have barred Milo from Tourism: his wife and daughter. Drummond knew that this seemingly simple task would be more difficult for him than storming the Iranian embassy in Moscow.
Clearly, his suspicions had been right-the department still didn’t trust him, and all the jobs that had come before were mere preparation, a three-month incubation before his rebirth into Tourism. An extended test, really, culminating in job nine: an envelope, gray Berlin skies, and the desire to snuff himself rather than see this little job through.
If he’d had no daughter, would it have been easier? He made a conscious decision to not dwell on that, but his brain ignored him. He wondered, foolishly, how many evil acts it takes to make a person evil. Six? Eighteen? Just one? How many had he committed?
What does the Bigger Voice say?
Stop.
He needed to know why. Why Adriana Stanescu had been condemned to death.
He’d picked through their garbage, tracked down bank accounts, took some time to shadow the Stanescus’ acquaintances, working around the clock. The only spot on their records was an uncle, Mihai, who worked in a bakery near the Tiergarten. He’d twice been arrested for bringing Moldovans illegally into Germany. A human smuggler, but small-time; otherwise, why would he rise at four each morning and not leave work until after four in the afternoon, flour dusting his hair and stuck to all his hard-to-wash spots?
By all appearances, the Stanescus were precisely what they seemed: a hardworking immigrant family with a lovely teenaged daughter.
Yet even as he investigated, he prepared. On Wednesday, he visited a bar not far from Alligator Taxi’s central office and struck up a conversation with Günter Wittinger, a young driver who’d been with Alligator only one year. He’d introduced himself as someone looking to break into the business, someone who needed advice. Despite what Radovan had said, his accent was good enough for this to work. Six beers later, Sebastian lifted Günter’s Alligator ID, then slipped out while the man was in the toilet.
By Thursday-which (he saw by the incongruous pink hearts filling store windows) was Valentine’s Day-it was prepared. He knew the way in and the way out. The method of execution and the method of disposal. He had the tools-the coarse wire, duct tape, a large roll of plastic, a backsaw-but when the cashier slipped the saw into a stiff paper bag, he nearly collapsed, imagining its use.
Though he could go through all the motions, the fact was that he was ruined. He was no longer Sebastian Hall, Tourist, but Milo Weaver, father. Then he broke all the laws of good sense and called his own father.
It was irrationally stupid. If his Voice of God found out he was whispering secrets to a senior UN official, he’d be dead. Even the old man became short with him on the phone. “You don’t need me, Misha. You just think you need me.”
“No, I do need you. Now.”
“It’s a simple thing. You’ve got it all planned out. So go do it.”
“You don’t understand. She looks just like Stephanie.”
“She looks nothing like Stephanie. This girl is twice Stephanie’s age.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Milo said, because now he knew. “It’s done. Our deal is finished. I’m not killing that girl just so you can have your source.”
Milo noticed that parental responsibility had done nothing to move the old man. This, though-the threat of losing an informer within the CIA-led Yevgeny Primakov to sigh and say, “Meet me in the Berliner Dom at nine in the morning. We’ll join the crowds.”
Before leaving that morning, Milo had scrubbed down the Friedrichshain pension and thrown away his toiletries and the two changes of clothes he’d picked up at KaDeWe. No matter what happened, he’d decided, today he would be finished with this damned city. To ensure that no one back at the Avenue of the Americas could follow his treasonous path, he’d taken apart his phone.
Now it was nine, and the Bavarians were trickling inside.
He approached the ticket window. The vendor, an old woman who’d lived in Berlin since its former life as three hundred and fifty square miles of rubble, squinted suspiciously when he said he wanted to see the church. He looked as hungover as he was, but his five-euro bill was clean enough.
Somehow, Yevgeny Primakov had gotten into the cold church before him, though Milo had entered just behind the last Bavarian. The old man was standing beneath a window topped by a biblical painting and the beatitude Selig sind, die reines Herzens sind. Blessed are the pure of heart. Milo’s alcohol-stunted vision wasn’t strong enough to read this, but he’d visited the church before and knew it was there.
His father didn’t bother looking at him. He stood with long, knotty hands clasped behind his back, gazing up at the painting. It had been five months since their last meeting, and Yevgeny Primakov was exactly as he remembered him. Thin white hair; fragile frame; thick eyebrows and a tendency to swipe at his cheek with the fore-finger of his left hand. The same exorbitant suits, which he imagined were de rigueur at all his United Nations functions. Milo, who was taller with dark features but the same heavy eyes, could never imagine aging to look like this.
That previous meeting had been like this one-an unconscionable risk. Milo had been out of jail less than a week when, late one night, frustrated and drunk, he climbed out of his Newark apartment’s window, crawled down the fire escape, and snuck into the opposite building where his twenty-four-hour shadow had been holing up. He knew the face-the young surveillance operative had been on him since the bus from prison-and knew who he was working for. He unlocked the man’s door with a screwdriver and a homemade pick and found him dozing on a cot beneath the open window, beside a video camera with a stack of tapes and a telescopic microphone. Fast-food wrappers and cups were scattered across the floor. He woke the kid with the screwdriver to his neck and said, very quietly, “You’ll tell that Russian bastard to meet with me within forty-eight hours.”
“Er… Russian?” the kid managed.
“The one who pulls your strings. The one even the UN doesn’t know is doing its sneaky work. You call him and tell him to bring everything on the senator.”
“What senator?”
“The one that cost me my family.”
Thirty-five hours later, Primakov had met him in that same dirty room, overdressed as usual, and criticized his description of the man in question. “No,” Yevgeny told him in Russian. “You cost yourself your own family, by being a liar.” He’d brought along the file on Senator Nathan Irwin anyway.
Not that it told Milo much that he didn’t already know, because someone like Irwin made sure the crucial details of his otherwise public life remained private. The senator had been behind last year’s Sudanese debacle-the murder of a Muslim cleric, which had led to riots that had claimed more than eighty lives-and his desperation to cover it up had led to more deaths, among them two of Milo’s close friends, and prison time for Milo. “This man may be at the top of your grievances list,” Yevgeny had said, “but that doesn’t mean he’s responsible for all your life’s disappointments.”
Now, five months later, the old man stared up at the painting that had caught his fancy and spoke to the figures, again in Russian. “I’ve been looking into this. It might be retribution against the uncle. The baker. You didn’t check on him, did you?”
“He’s had some trouble with the law. I watched him. He’s clean enough.”
“Well, I did more than watch. Mihai Stanescu’s involved in immigrant affairs. He works with incoming easterners and sets them up with jobs. That’s how the girl’s family got here. Sometimes he sneaks them in. He’s got connections with the Russian mafia in Transnistria-which is another way of saying he’s got government connections. I’m guessing he’s using those immigrants to transport heroin into Germany.”
Milo didn’t quite believe it. “So? Why kill his niece?”
“Maybe he’s been warned. Maybe the kid’s involved.”
“She’s not.”
“So you keep saying.”
“I’m right, Yevgeny.”
His father didn’t answer immediately, because three Bavarians materialized close behind them and whispered in awed tones, gesturing up at the painting, one waving his camera around. Once they’d moved on, he said, “You know as well as I do that it would take a lot longer than a week to find out why your people want some girl dead. Just because New York won’t tell you doesn’t mean there isn’t a reason.”
Milo didn’t bother answering, because the subject had moved beyond argument by now. No evidence would sway him.
Primakov turned to look at his son, though at first he focused past him to take in the milling tourists sprinkled throughout the cathedral. His focus drew back, and he frowned. “You look absolutely terrible, Misha. You stink.”
“Perils of the job.”
Primakov turned back to the painting. “My opinion? You’re probably right. This girl has nothing to do with anything, and her death will serve no one’s interests. Except, of course, your immediate supervisor’s. Who is he?”
Even now, Primakov was trying to extract what he could. “Alan Drummond.”
“He’s new, then? I thought Mendel was running it.”
“Drummond says he’s gone now.”
“And this Drummond is…?”
“A voice on the telephone.”
Without turning to face him, Primakov said, “You didn’t check up on the voice on the telephone asking you to kill little girls?”
Milo stared at the back of his father’s head. “Yale. Marines-Afghanistan for two years. Moved to the Company in ’05. Arms Control Intelligence Staff. Requested transfer to Congressional Affairs the next year. Can’t say how he got to Tourism. Friends, I suppose.”
“Who’s he friends with?”
“Don’t know, but it can’t be nobody.”
Primakov swatted at his cheek. “It makes sense, then. Mendel’s been vetting you the slow way. Easy jobs. This Drummond takes over, and he wants to show his government sponsors what a big shot he is; he wants Tourism up and running. So he looks at your file and notices your daughter. Ideally, he’d find a six-year-old for you to take care of, but that’s a lot to ask anyone, even a Tourist. So he doubles the age and pulls out a random name.”
“Then what I said stands. It’s finished. I’m not killing some kid just to clear my name with New York.”
“I’d suggest you think about it first.”
“I’ve been thinking for a week, Yevgeny.” He paused. “Mother won’t allow it.”
The old man swiped at his cheek again. “Been hearing her voice again?”
“Occasionally.”
The fact that his son was listening to a dead woman didn’t faze Yevgeny Primakov. “You don’t have to kill her, you know. You said they want no traces, no body. Disappearance is enough.”
“Hold her in a basement somewhere? Thanks for the help.”
He turned to leave, but Primakov caught his arm, and they walked together down the southern aisle. “You’re strung out. Pills again?”
“Not many.”
“We need you healthy, Misha. I don’t want you buried yet. Neither does Tina. Have you talked to her?”
Quick, elastic memories stretched into his head. That last meeting with his wife-November, the day after the Company came calling. Their counseling sessions had been circling around the same arguments, never moving forward. Trust-that was the issue. Tina had learned too much about her husband. No one, she’d explained in front of the therapist, likes to feel like the fool in a relationship. Over the weeks he’d seen no sign of forgiveness, so he said yes to the Company, and the next day announced his new job with the vague descriptor field work. The therapist, noticing the sudden chill in the room, asked Tina if she had something she felt like saying. Tina stroked the corner of her long, sensual lips. Well, I was going to suggest he move back in with Stef and me. That’s off the table now, isn’t it?
The worst timing.
“Misha?”
The old man was grabbing his shoulders, pulling him deeper into the shadows.
“No need to cry over it, son. She’s still your wife, and Stephanie will always be your daughter. There’s plenty of hope.”
Milo wiped his cheeks dry, not even embarrassed anymore. “You don’t actually know that.”
The old man grinned; his dentures were a blinding white. “Sure I do. Unlike you, I’ve been stopping in to visit my daughter-in-law and granddaughter.”
This surprised him. “What did you say?”
“The truth, of course. I told her all about your mother, how she died, and why you kept your childhood, and me, a secret.”
“Did she understand?”
“Really, Misha. You don’t give people enough credit. Least of all your wife.” He rubbed his son’s back. “She knows you’re not able to get in touch now. But when you’re able, I think it wouldn’t be a bad idea to call on her.”
It was the best news he’d gotten in months. For almost a minute, Adriana Stanescu ceased to exist, and he could breathe. Still hungover, yes, but his feet were stable. He cleared his throat and again wiped his face. “Thanks, Yevgeny.”
“Don’t mention it. Let’s go fix your little problem.”
They left five minutes apart, taking separate routes to an apartment near Hausvogteiplatz and its flower-petal fountain. The renovated two-bedroom on the third floor was registered to a Lukas Steiner, marked on the mailboxes Milo passed on his way up. When he asked, Primakov was elusive. “Steiner’s a friend, even if he doesn’t know it. Luckily, he’s on holiday in Egypt. And no,” he added when he saw what was in Milo’s hand, “you can’t smoke in here.”
It took them two hours and a pot of coffee to hammer out a suitable plan. More than once, his father would stop and say, “Look, I know you don’t like it, but killing her might be the only option.”
“It’s not an option.”
Primakov seemed to understand, though his understanding failed him now and then, and he restated his opinion with different words. Finally, Milo struck the dining room table in a childish fit of anger. “Enough! Don’t you get it?”
“But really, Misha-”
“You think I could ever go home again if I did that?”
This obviously hadn’t occurred to him, and he let it go.
The old man occasionally asked casual questions about his life, though since a Tourist’s life is the same as his work, he was in effect requesting intel on his son’s jobs. Milo was too exhausted to bother lying. Besides, the man had saved his life last year, and the sooner he handed over information the sooner he’d be free of that debt. “A robbery. Should be wrapped up in a few days.”
“Robbery? What is it, diamonds? Some politician’s boudoir?”
“Art museum.”
As he stirred his coffee, Primakov seemed to enjoy the images those two words provoked, and then he didn’t. He soured visibly and placed the spoon on the counter. “Zürich?”
“Yes.”
Primakov sipped his coffee. “This is the problem with the world, you know.”
“Is it?”
“No one thinks about the bigger picture anymore, just his own gain. Robbing an art museum is like robbing a library; there’s no integrity to it. Great art hangs in museums for the betterment of society, for the man on the street.”
“For the proletariat?”
“Wipe that smile off your face. It’s the social contract you’ve broken. Not that you care, and not that they care in the Avenue of the Americas. Whose idea was it?”
Milo had seldom seen him so angry. “Mine. I needed to collect money. This was the easiest and quickest way I could think of.”
“Easiest and quickest?” Primakov let out a rare but bitter laugh. “You’ve got a Degas, a Monet, a van Gogh, and a Cézanne-the biggest art heist in Swiss history. How do you expect to sell those off? You think no one’s going to notice?”
“Let me worry about that.”
“Oh yes,” said the old man. “I’ll let you worry about it, because to you those paintings are just a pile of money.” He shook his head. “If I’d raised you, you’d know better.”
“If you’d raised me, Yevgeny, we wouldn’t be here in the first place.”
They returned to the plan. Its initial steps had never been in question-Primakov agreed that Milo’s scheme to lure Adriana into the courtyard between her school and her father’s taxi was suitable enough. The question was what would follow, and how quickly Primakov could arrange things on his side.
Very quickly, it turned out. As a man who commanded his own intelligence unit hidden within the folds of the United Nations’ baroque superstructure, who could act with relative freedom because so few knew his office even existed, Yevgeny Primakov only needed to make two calls.
They decided to put the plan into effect that afternoon.
Milo filled his coffee-bitter stomach with garlic chicken from a Chinese diner, then picked up a ten-year-old BMW 3 Series with enough trunk space from outside a drab office block in Berlin-Mitte. It took about forty seconds for the Company-issue remote on his key ring to find the right combination; the car bleeped and unlocked. He slipped inside, pulling the door shut, and forced open the panels around the ignition tumbler with a screwdriver he’d lifted from Lukas Steiner’s apartment, connected the cables, then used the screwdriver to turn the ignition. He pulled out into the Berlin traffic. Hopefully the job would be done before anyone noticed the car was missing.
He was in Kreuzberg by four, parked inside the courtyard on Gneisenaustrasse. The apartments that looked down on his BMW were full of young professionals, most of whom would be at work. For fifteen minutes, he sat behind the wheel, waiting. When a retiree wandered in to use the trash bins, he lay down as if searching for something that had dropped under the passenger seat.
By the time the students were released from their imprisonment at four thirty, he had used a T-shirt to wipe down the seats, steering wheel, gearshift, and handles and then taken his position by the courtyard entrance. The broad street, cut down the middle by a median of leafless trees, was packed with shops, and nearby he noted a small Sri Lankan and Indian restaurant, the Chandra Kumari, its strong scent filling the street. Then, farther down and across the street, he spotted a navy blue Opel sedan with Berlin plates and two Germans inside, looking intensely bored.
It was that, the look of boredom, so intense that it could only be fake, that caught his eye. Then the familiarity. It took about a minute to figure it out: Earlier in the week, while surveying the Imperial Tobacco factory where Rada Stanescu worked, he’d seen that same car. The same two men who, from their dress, hair, and glasses, looked German. One young-late twenties-the other somewhere past fifty. The same men. The same boredom.
He fought the impulse to jump back into the safety of the courtyard. Instead, he glanced at his watch and thought it through. Only two people knew where he was-Yevgeny and his new master, Alan Drummond. Of them, only Drummond had known where he was earlier in the week.
Alan Drummond still didn’t trust him, and so, rather than assign another Tourist or depopulate a curious embassy, he had asked the Germans to run a casual surveillance. No, not a terrorist, just a potential problem. All we need is a report on his movements.
This, of course, was another level of the vetting. If the Germans saw him molesting a schoolgirl-or worse, killing her-they wouldn’t sit idly by as the crime was committed. Drummond, like any manipulator, was raising the stakes of his final exam. Whether or not Milo had the stomach for the job was one thing; Drummond also wanted to know that he had the chops for it.
Despite a fresh wave of anxiety that tickled the Chinese food in his guts, this changed nothing. If the plan went properly, his minders wouldn’t prove more than a distraction, Alan Drummond be damned.
Adriana Stanescu, it turned out, was not a stupid girl. Despite being ashamed of her parents’ professions, she knew, as most children do, which of her parents’ commands made sense. Not speaking to strangers, for instance-Adriana had been taught that one. When Milo said, “Entschuldigung,” Excuse me, she only hesitated in midstep, then continued. He tried again. “Adriana. Your father, Andrei, told me to pick you up. He’s stuck over in Charlottenburg.”
When the girl stopped, her little backpack, emblazoned with a manga superhero, bounced against her thin back. She turned to him. “Who are you?”
She was a clean-cheeked beauty, beautiful in an entirely different way than his own daughter, but that made it no easier. “Günter.” He took out the Alligator Taxi ID, on which he’d pasted his own picture. “Look, all I know is Andrei said you’d prefer if I parked out of sight. Maybe you’d be embarrassed by the taxi, I don’t know. Anyway,” he said as he shot a thumb over his shoulder, “I’m right in there if you want me to drive you home.”
Adriana considered her choices, and perhaps it was the shame of her embarrassment, the fact that even her father’s co-worker knew about it, that made her nod. “Okay. Danke.”
He politely let her go first, a gust of sweet children’s perfume filling his nose as she passed. He watched the Japanese cartoon character bounce as they entered the courtyard and left the Germans’ field of vision. He slipped on a pair of leather gloves. Though coffee and lunch had cleared away his hangover, he still felt sick, and that little animated creature-what was it? a mouse? a dog?-just made him queasier.
Once inside the courtyard, facing three parked cars, Adriana stopped and turned around. “Where’s your taxi?” She wasn’t afraid, just curious.
This was the hardest part, the messy part. He’d toyed with the idea of telling her everything, but she wouldn’t believe him. Of course she wouldn’t. She would put up a fight, scream, bolt into the street. She no doubt remembered the story of Natascha Kampusch who, surviving eight years of imprisonment after being kidnapped at the age often, had finally found a way to escape just two years ago.
The only answer was force. So when she said, “Where’s your taxi?” he smiled and raised an arm to point. As she turned to look again, he stepped closer, clapped a hand over her mouth and nose, and reached an arm around her stomach to grab her right elbow. He lifted her high, her legs kicking, muted squeals leaking from between his gloved fingers, but she was small enough for him to carry to the BMW as he sought a point four inches down from her elbow, a pressure point called Colon 10. Once by the trunk, he kept up the pressure, squeezing her stomach, pressing the nerve in her arm, and cutting off her air. Any one of these points, if dealt with violently, could have knocked her out, but he didn’t want to hurt her. So he did all three at once, until her kicks slowed and she fainted.
He turned her limp body around and listened to her breaths. He pried open her eyes-bloodshot, but okay. She would be unconscious for no more than ten minutes.
With her body over one arm, he popped open the trunk and laid her inside. He quickly used a roll of duct tape to seal her lips and bind her feet and ankles. Once finished, he made a mistake: He paused to look down at her again. He took in her entire length, folded carefully into the trunk, and his stomach convulsed. He slammed the trunk and ran to the driver’s side. He got the door open and threw himself across the seat. He waited, but in the end his stomach was stronger than Stefan’s had been.
From his first Entschuldigung to this moment, two minutes had passed.
He backed out of the courtyard, made a U-turn at the next corner, then drove south. At the intersection of Gneisenaustrasse and Mehringdamm, he passed an Alligator Taxi with Andrei Stanescu behind the wheel, looking at his watch. In the rearview, the Opel sedan pulled slowly into the road and kept a steady distance behind him.
It took fifteen minutes to reach Tempelhof Airport’s long-term parking lot. By then, Adriana had awakened, as he had expected she would, but during the fast drive down the B96, he hadn’t heard a thing. Only when he slowed at the entrance and stopped to take an automated parking ticket did he hear her kicking against the walls of her tiny prison. His stomach went bad again, but he kept it under control, and once he’d parked, the sound of her struggling seemed incomprehensibly loud. He got out, leaving the car unlocked and the screwdriver in place. He followed her noises to the trunk. He took out his wallet and flipped through it as if counting cash, but said in German, “Adriana, it’s going to be okay. Nothing will happen to you. In a few minutes someone else will take you out. Go with him. He’s here to protect you.”
If it weren’t for the duct tape, Adriana Stanescu might have shouted German or elaborate Moldovan curses at him, but all he heard was wordless moans and three sharp kicks of her bound feet against the inside of the trunk. He ran to catch an airport shuttle arriving at a nearby stop. Just beyond the stop, the Opel had pulled into a space but kept idling. At the sight of Milo running toward the bus, the car backed out again. He moved to the rear of the half-full bus and watched the sedan follow him to the airport.
Milo had nearly expected failure, but since any good Tourist’s travel plans are often thrown awry, failure didn’t concern him. In fact, a part of him wished for it-perhaps at the airport ticket booth (had there been a person handing out tickets), or in the parking lot (had the German shadows decided to check his car before shadowing the bus). If failure stopped him in his tracks, he could end the pointless game. Not only this particular job, but all jobs, forever.
It didn’t fail. The Germans followed him to the mostly empty airport-it was scheduled to close down later that year-and took notes as he bought a ticket for the next departing flight, to Dortmund. He depended on his Sebastian Hall papers too much to risk them, so he used his emergency documents-a U.K. passport that gave his name as Gerald Stanley, resident of Gloucester.
They watched him wait for the 6:50 P.M. departure. Out in the lot, he knew, his father parked beside the BMW, opened the trunk, and with the help of some friends transferred the struggling girl to another car in order to save her life.
His shadows tired before boarding began. He imagined that they were going to check out the BMW, but it would now be empty.
Yet by the time he was on the plane, taxiing down the old Tempelhof runway, his surety faded. Would Yevgeny keep his promise? It was a big responsibility: Keep the girl hidden for a month or two while the police searched for her. The parents could make honest cries of despair, and after the attention had died down Yevgeny would contact them. The child is fine, he would say, but the only way to get her back safely is to keep her a secret, to leave your lives in Berlin and move away-perhaps return to Moldova-under new names, where you can live together in peace. Yevgeny would take care of the particulars-the passports, transportation, visas if necessary-but he would have to be assured of their silence.
A telling detail from their debate had been Yevgeny’s doubt that the girl’s parents would be willing to leave their lives for the sake of Adriana. “Of course they would agree to it immediately, but later, when they’re trapped in some lonely town far from Western civilization, don’t you think they might change their minds? Contact old friends and family?”
It told him that Yevgeny couldn’t imagine sacrificing his own future for the sake of either of his daughters, much less for the out-of-wedlock son who’d caused him more grief, probably, than he had been worth. As his plane crested cloud, Milo wondered if the old man, after some consideration, would realize what trouble this plan was and decide to end all their problems with a bullet.
He would have to see for himself. In a few weeks, he decided, he would demand to visit the girl.
Exhausted, he burned the Alligator ID and his Gerald Stanley papers in Dortmund and spent the night in a hotel as Sebastian Hall. He also put his phone back together, but no one called. In the morning, he bought a change of clothes in the Westenhellweg shopping center, rented a car, and drove through the Ruhr, where industrial and once-industrial cities like Bochum and Essen passed; then the landscape turned to farmland as he continued into the Netherlands. By Saturday afternoon, he’d reached Amsterdam, turned in his car, and boarded a bus heading to Belgium. Only once he’d taken a room at Antwerp’s Hotel Tourist that evening did he pick up some German newspapers. The only sign of Milo Weaver’s trail of destruction was a brief update, on the arts pages, on the lack of progress on the E. G. Bührle theft. There was no mention of Adriana Stanescu-the Berlin police would be waiting seventy-two hours before raising the alarm.
He ate a dinner of beef stewed in red wine with pearl onions, the obligatory french fries, and two half liters of Vondel brown ale. The meal left him tired again, so he climbed up to his meager room. Before sleep came, a cell phone melody jolted him.
“Yeah?” he said irritably.
“Riverrun, past Eve.”
“And Adam’s.”
“Nice job, Hall. We’ve even heard of it over here. The family’s been hounding the police.”
“I’m glad you’re pleased.”
“None of us can figure out where you put her. In Kreuzberg?”
“Ask me no questions, Alan.”
“I am asking you, Sebastian.”
The lie came out smoothly because it had been practiced. “There was a second car in the courtyard. That’s where I put her. After your Germans left me at the Tempelhof gate, I doubled back. I picked up the car and drove her out to the countryside.”
“What Germans?”
“The ones you sent to watch over me.”
Drummond paused, perhaps wondering about the uses and misuses of irony. “You lost me. I didn’t send anyone.”
“Doesn’t matter. It’s done.”
“It might matter. If someone’s following you-”
“No one’s following me now.”
Another pause. “Where are you?”
It was a pointless question, as Drummond’s computer charted the location of all his Tourists’ phones. “Antwerp.”
“You’ll be heading back to Zürich now?”
“Yeah.”
“First thing when you arrive, drop by the Best Western Hotel Krone. There’ll be a letter for you.”
He rubbed his eyes. “Listen, I’ve got things to prepare.”
“Won’t take long, Hall. Trust me on that. Just follow the instructions and you’ll be done in no time.”
The line went dead.
From hotel to hotel, the trip took nearly nine hours, placing him in the Best Western’s arid lobby by six Sunday evening. He drove most of the way in a Toyota he’d picked up on an Antwerp side street using his key ring, then dumped the car just over the Swiss border in Basel, wiped it down with a towel he found in the trunk, and took an hour-long train to Zürich Hauptbahnhof, where the previous night’s snow had blackened into mud.
He gave his Tourism name to a demure desk clerk with tight, tired eyes and received an envelope with SEBASTIAN HALL scribbled across it. As he headed back to the front doors, he realized he was being watched by a man and a woman, placed strategically at opposite ends of the lobby, wearing matching dark suits, one clutching a Herald Tribune, the other an Economist. They watched him stop at the doors, where he read the note. One word: Outside.
He found a spot on busy, cold Schaffhauserstrasse, beyond the reach of some inconspicuous security cameras at the next corner. The two lobby watchers didn’t follow him out.
It only took five minutes. A gray Lincoln Town Car made wet sounds through the dirty snow as it pulled up to the curb. The back door opened, and a man not much older than him-maybe forty-peered out. That now familiar voice said, “Riverrun, Hall. Get inside.”
He did so, and as the car started moving again Drummond said, “We finally meet like civilized people.” He gave a tight-lipped smile but made no attempt to shake hands.
He was young for a Tourism director, and his dark hair was long enough to be pulled back behind his ears-far from his time in the marines. He had reading glasses in his shirt pocket and a broad, all-American chin.
“Pleased to meet you, sir,” Milo said, watching the lights of Zürich pass by. “You in town just to see me?”
“You’d like to think that,” said Drummond, still smiling. “No-Kosovo’s proclaiming its independence soon. I’m in for a little discussion with some representatives.”
“Should be heated.”
“You think so?”
“Depends on our policy. Serbia won’t take it sitting down. At least Kosovo waited until the Serb elections were finished. If they’d done it beforehand, the nationalists would have swept the vote.”
The smile vanished. “I wasn’t too sure about you, Hall. I got some wind about you causing major havoc last year. Enough that I wouldn’t have brought you back. You’re too…” He snapped his fingers, but the word wouldn’t be summoned. “Your Tourism career ended seven years ago with-the reports tell me-a breakdown. Then you moved into administration and-I’m just being honest here, you understand-and your record in the Avenue of the Americas was not particularly stellar. As for the way it ended…” He shook his head. “Well, you were accused of killing Tom Grainger, my predecessor.” He squeezed his lips together and cleared his throat. “Anything to say about all this?”
Milo didn’t have much to say, because, looking into Drummond’s smug face, he lost all desire to impress the man. He tried anyway. “I was cleared of those charges.”
“Well, I know that. They do let me see files now and then. It was another Tourist who killed Grainger.”
“Yes.”
“Now, that Tourist-him, you killed.”
“You seem very well informed, sir.”
“I’ve got facts, Sebastian. Plenty of them. It’s the messiness that troubles me. A Tourism director dead. A Tourist. Not to mention Terence Fitzhugh, the Senate liaison… suicide, if you trust the files.”
“Angela Yates,” said Milo.
“Right. An embassy staffer. She was the first to go, wasn’t she?”
Milo nodded.
“All this messiness. All this blood. With you at the center of it.”
Milo wondered if he’d really been summoned to Zürich to be accused of murder again. So he waited. Drummond didn’t bother speaking. Milo finally said, “I guess you’ll have to ask Mendel why he brought me back.”
“He didn’t tell you?”
“Something about budgets.”
Drummond stared at him, thinking this over. “Messy or not, you’re enough of a pro to be let in on a few things. Last year’s budget problems have intensified, and Grainger turning up dead did nothing for us in Washington. It seemed to echo all our enemies’ arguments. That we’re irresponsible and expensive, financially and in terms of human lives.”
“Sounds about right, sir.”
“Sense of humor. I like that. The point is that by now when we lose a Tourist we don’t have the resources to replace him. In Mendel’s estimation, you had at least been trained before, and all it would take was a relatively cheap catch-up course.”
“I was cut-rate.”
Drummond grinned.
“How many have we lost?”
“Tourists? Enough. Luck isn’t always on our side.”
That struck Milo as an entirely banal way to explain away the deaths of human beings, but he set aside his annoyance and turned to the window as they merged onto a highway, heading out of town.
“Last year,” Drummond said, “when things went sour for you, was there anyone outside the department who knew the details of what happened?”
“Janet Simmons, a Homelander-she learned a lot. I don’t think she got the whole story, but she’s smart enough to put some things together.”
“We’ve vetted her,” Drummond said. “Is that all?”
Yevgeny Primakov knew everything, but that was a treason he didn’t feel up to admitting. “She’s the only living person. She and Senator Nathan Irwin.”
“The senator knows everything?”
“Of course. He was the one behind the Sudanese operation.”
“You know this?”
“No real evidence, but yes, I know it.”
A pause. “Senator Irwin’s the only one keeping the department alive. I don’t think we need to worry about him. We can thank him for any operational budget we still enjoy.”
Milo realized with dismay that the senator was quite possibly Drummond’s government sponsor, the friend who had landed him his new job in Tourism. But all he said was, “Do all these questions have a point? Sir?”
Drummond cleared his throat. “Look, Hall. I didn’t call you here to play around with you.” He produced a looser smile, to show how human he was. “I called you because you did an excellent job in Berlin. I had my eye on you, you know.”
“So did the Germans.”
“You keep saying that. Did they have the German flag plastered across their foreheads?”
“German haircuts.”
“Well, I hope they didn’t take useful notes.”
“I’m sure they didn’t.”
“Good,” he said, then looked at his hands, which Milo noticed were unusually red. “I knew it was going to be a hard one. For someone like you.”
“Hard, how?”
“It being a girl.”
Milo tried to appear bored. “The job itself was child’s play.”
“I’m glad you feel that way. And the other job, the financial work?”
“Should be wrapped up by the end of the week.”
“Good. Because it raised some eyebrows in Manhattan when you requested that six hundred grand.”
“You have a pen and paper?”
“Check the armrest.”
Milo opened the leather armrest that separated them and found two bottles of Evian, a stereo remote control, and a pen and pad. He wrote down a twenty-one-digit code, and when he handed it to Drummond he wondered what kind of circulation problem caused his redness. Another medical question. “Here’s the account’s IBAN. Money should be there by Thursday. Harry Lynch knows how to withdraw it without leaving fingerprints. Is Harry still around?”
Drummond looked confused. He still hadn’t learned the names of his underlings at the Avenue of the Americas.
“Doesn’t matter,” said Milo. “I just need one thing from you.”
“What’s that?”
“The name and number of the insurance adjuster working on the E. G. Bührle theft.”
Drummond got him into focus. “Oh.” He nodded, finally understanding. “Very good. I’ll send that to your phone.” He ripped out the page and folded it into his shirt pocket, thinking this over, then muttered, “It’s a pity.”
“Pity?”
“That we have to do this. This kind of thing. But Ascot wants to run Tourism into the ground. Bleeding us, at a time when oil prices are driving airfares into the sky.”
“So that’s what this is about. Keeping the department running.”
“We do what we must to stay alive.”
Milo considered asking if it was worth it, keeping alive a secret department that even Quentin Ascot, the CIA director, wanted to erase. It was a moot question, though: All government departments work on the basic understanding that their existence is enough reason to continue existing. Out the window was the blackness of countryside.
“You going to tell me where we’re going?”
Drummond followed his gaze. “Two weeks ago, in Paris, the embassy got a walk-in.”
“French?”
“Ukrainian. Name’s Marko Dzubenko. He was in town as part of an entourage for their internal affairs minister. He’d been in town only three days when he came to us.”
“Employer?”
“SSU,” he said, referring to the Security Service of Ukraine. “He made no secret of it, particularly once the staff threatened to kick him out of the building. He wanted us to know he was an important defector.”
“Is he?”
Drummond shrugged theatrically and settled against the far door. “Only if he’s trustworthy, and for the moment I don’t believe anything he tells us. Not until we know more about him. At this point we’ve just got the basics. Forty-six years old. Kiev University-foreign relations. Joined the secret police when he was twenty-four, then moved into intelligence after the Russians left. Paris was a coup for him-his previous trips were to Moscow, Tallinn, Beijing, and Ashgabat; that’s in Turkmenistan.”
“I know where Ashgabat is.”
“Of course you do. But it was news to me.”
“What rank is he?” Milo asked.
“Second lieutenant.”
“Not so bad. Why does he want to leave?”
“That’s the question, isn’t it?” said Drummond. “According to him, it’s personal gain. He’s being stifled at home, skipped over for promotion, while the new capitalists are making millions. He says capitalism has cheated him. From the looks of his accounts, it’s at least passed him by.” Drummond pursed his lips. “He wants a new life in America, but what does he have to buy it with? Marko’s trips were trade based, and that’s largely what he had for us. Ukrainian trade secrets?” He smiled again. “The man actually thought that would buy him a life in America!”
Alan Drummond’s mirth lasted a few seconds longer than expected, then drained away when he saw his guest wasn’t encouraging it. Milo said, “Well, there’s a reason we’re sitting here talking about him. And it’s not Ukrainian exports.”
“It’s not,” Drummond muttered. “He spent a while giving us reams of useless information, most of which we had already. He saw we were fading fast. So he panicked and pulled out his wild card. He said that there’s a mole in the Department of Tourism.”
Silence followed, the engine rumbling beneath them. “Did he actually say those words?” asked Milo.
“He knew about the department and specified the mole was there.”
While the department liked to think of itself as existing in a parallel universe of absolute secrecy, Milo knew a few people who had figured out its existence-but they had been allies and friends. “The Ukrainians have someone inside? It’s hard to swallow.”
Drummond shook his head. “Marko claims it’s a Chinese mole.”
“Chinese?”
“The Guoanbu.”
Milo stared at him.
“Short for Guojia Anquan Bu, their Ministry for State Security.”
“I know what the Guoanbu is,” Milo said, irritated. “I’m just confused.”
Drummond ignored his confusion for the moment. “When he mentioned Tourism, as you can imagine, the agent in charge of his interrogation was baffled. No idea what Marko was talking about. So he went up to the embassy’s security director, who was just as baffled. In fact, he was going to write Marko off as a nut job and dump him somewhere, but to cover his ass he sent a query to Langley. It landed on the assistant director’s desk, and he came directly to me. Gleefully, I might add. A mole is just the kind of thing Ascot would happily use to hang us. So I sent one of ours to talk to him, and we shipped him here.”
“Why not to the States?”
“He’ll get there eventually,” said Drummond. “I want you to listen to him first.”
“Why me?”
“Because his story concerns you and everything that came raining down last July. And the only thing in the files on it is one single-spaced page that goes out of its way to not say a thing. Which makes me a fucking ignoramus.”
“Really?” Milo asked, not sure he could trust that Drummond was so ill informed.
“Believe it,” he said sourly. “Dzubenko has told me a novel compared to the haiku I was handed when I took over.”
“Wait a minute,” said Milo, raising a hand. “How does a Ukrainian second lieutenant learn about a Chinese mole in a secret CIA department? How does this make any sense?”
“Luck,” Drummond said. “Over the last few years, the Chinese have been pouring agents into the Ukraine, and Marko spent some time with them. He doesn’t like them very much.”
“And they told him about their mole? Come on, Alan. Besides, the Chinese almost never invest in long-term double agents.”
“I know this,” he said, “but don’t be so quick to doubt it.”
Milo peered out at the blackness again, then looked at Drummond. “I’m getting a sick feeling of déjà vu. Last year a friend of mine was accused of sharing secrets with the Chinese. It wasn’t true, and maybe if I’d known that from the start she wouldn’t be dead now.”
“This was Angela Yates?”
Milo nodded.
After a moment’s reflection, Drummond said, “Listen to what he has to say. I don’t want to believe it either, but if his story checks out, then I’m going to have to clean the department. It’s not the way a new director wants to spend his opening weeks, but I won’t have a choice.”
Milo’s hand twitched; he was catching Drummond’s itchy agitation. “Well, then? Who is it? Don’t tell me he held that back.”
“He has no idea. From his story, it could only be in administration. A Travel Agent, most likely. Not a Tourist.”
Milo rubbed his knees. Travel Agents collected and sorted intelligence from Tourists and tracked their positions. A mole among their ranks could pass on anything. “Who else have you called in?”
“Just Tourists. Our driver, and some extra help-I got them from the war on drugs. I’ve also collected some folks from other departments for analysis and background checks. I’ll get you their phone numbers before sending you off again.”
“Am I going somewhere?”
“You’re always going somewhere, Sebastian. If your chat with him works out, you’ll be checking on some of the Ukrainian intel Marko’s been giving me. It might not be outstanding stuff, but it’s another way to vet him, and if it isn’t legitimate it’ll give me extra reason to doubt the mole story.”
“I’m not much of an interrogator,” Milo admitted. “You should call in John. He’s rough, but he gets results.”
Drummond stared at him a moment, as if shocked by the suggestion. “This guy came to us. I’m not going to have John fit those electrodes to his tits just to hear him scream.” He sniffed. “Really, what was the department like before I came along?”
“You don’t want to know,” Milo said, then took a box from his pocket and dry-swallowed two more Dexedrine.
Despite a broad stomach and thinning black hair, Marko Dzubenko was a young-looking forty-six. He wore a faux-silk shirt with rolled-up sleeves, the collar open to expose an Orthodox cross buried in chest hair, watching the German edition of Big Brother as he chain-smoked. The only sign of age lay in the gray stubble that ran along his jaw-line.
Milo stuck out a hand as he approached. “Good evening. I’m here to ask some questions.”
His handshake was hot and dry. Instead of returning the greeting, Dzubenko shook a smoldering Marlboro at the television. “Great show, no?”
The television camera was angled high in a corner of a kitchen, and two pretty twentysomethings were arguing. “Never got around to watching it.”
“Great show,” he repeated. “I am for the Melly. I would easily do her.”
“Marko?”
“Yeah?” he said to the television.
Milo picked up the remote and turned it off. Dzubenko rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. “Motherfucker. I am already answer you fuckers’ questions, okay? Twenty fucking times!”
Suppressing the urge to strike him, Milo switched to Russian. “And you’ll continue to answer the questions, or we’ll beat you, sodomize you, then dump you naked in the bad part of Mogadishu.”
Marko’s head jerked back as if he’d been slapped; then he smiled and put out his cigarette. “Finally. Someone who speaks Russian with balls. Want a cigarette?” He lifted the pack.
Milo preferred his Davidoffs but knew how sharing cigarettes created an instant bond between Slavs. He produced his lighter and lit Marko’s first, then his own.
He settled on a chair that he recognized from old trips with Tina through IKEA. Then he recognized the sofa Dzubenko sat on. In fact, the whole lower floor of this two-story farmhouse outside Frauenfeld, not far from the highway, had been fitted with that Swedish company’s functional furniture. Around the house lay acres of cold, flat field, empty save for four Company guards with infrared binoculars. Upstairs, in a room the size of a closet, Drummond was watching them through video monitors. By morning, he would have a transcription of the whole conversation, with English translation.
“So, Marko. I hear you’ve got a story about the Chinese for us.”
The Ukrainian stared at the black television and shrugged. “They tell you about all the hot Kiev information? Man, you can worry about the Chinese all you want, but it’s the Kievskaya Rus’ you should really worry about.”
“Trust me, we are worried. But I’m here about the Chinese. You want to tell me how a man like you learns of a secret Chinese plot?”
Dzubenko glared at him, as if his word couldn’t be doubted, but said, “Biggest intelligence organization on the planet, so what do you think? Guoanbu. The motherfuckers are all over Kiev now. It’s getting like Chinatown. They know how important we are, how we’re positioned. Russian fuckers on one side, European Union on the other-it all rubs.”
“Friction.”
“Exactly,” he said, using his cigarette to point at Milo. “I’ve got respect for them-don’t get me wrong. They spend money on their people, place them all over the world. They’re smart. But that doesn’t mean I have to like it when they take over my hometown and my hard-ass bosses start treating them like princesses they’ve got boners for. Know what I mean?”
Milo didn’t, not exactly-he hadn’t been in the Ukraine since the nineties, and the Guoanbu hadn’t gained a foothold there yet-but he could imagine. “Look, I’m just surprised the Chinese shared their secrets with a Ukrainian second lieutenant.”
“It wasn’t like that,” said Dzubenko. “It was at a party. On Grushevskogo Street.”
“The Chinese embassy.”
“Of course.”
“What for?”
“What?”
“Why was there a party?”
“Oh! Chinese New Year. They’ve got their own, you know.”
“So do Ukrainians. What date?”
“Beginning of the month. February 7.”
“And they invited an SSU second lieutenant?”
Dzubenko frowned at his cigarette and chewed the inside of his mouth. “You’re trying to get a rise out of me, but it’s not going to work. I’m sure of the rightness of my position.”
“I’m just trying to understand, Marko.”
“It was my boss. Lutsenko. Bogdan Lutsenko. He’s a colonel-you can check on that in your files. He was invited, and he asked if I wanted to come along. I said, Why not? But I didn’t know, did I?”
“Didn’t know what?”
“How it would make me sick to my stomach, being there. And that Xin Zhu would be there soaking up all the attention.”
“Xin Zhu?”
“Guoanbu,” Dzubenko told him. “Don’t know his rank, but it must be high up. He’s a fat fucker. Big as a cow. Carries himself like some fucking sheik. Half his entourage were slant-eyes, the other half were my bosses, laughing at all his jokes.”
“What kinds of jokes?”
“Russian jokes. China’s full of those jokes, I guess. It didn’t hurt that he told them in excellent Russian. Plays on words, that sort of thing. Had them in stitches. You know what it looked like to me?”
“What?”
“Like the defeated fawning over their new masters. That’s what it looked like to me. So I went out on the terrace and started smoking, waiting to go home. I got through two cigarettes before he came out to join me.”
“He?”
“Xin Fucking Zhu.”
Milo allowed an expression of surprise to slip into his features. “You’re fucking kidding me.”
“I am not. He brings his fat ass outside. It’s cold, you know, but he’s still sweating. Glowing from all the attention. That’s why he came out-inside, he’d melt. He lights up and we get talking. And the guy is funny, I have to admit. Even drunk-and the guy is really drunk. We talk about Kiev, and he tells me some of the places he likes. Not tourist shit-no. Some of the best clubs, the ones you have to look hard to find.”
“He goes out dancing?” Milo asked doubtfully.
“Ha!” Dzubenko spat, imagining that. “Please. He goes out looking for hot chicks, what else? We share war stories about girlfriends. Very funny, that guy. He convinces me to come back in, and I end up staying until after midnight. Fun time.”
Milo stared at him, waiting, but Dzubenko didn’t seem to want to go on. “Well?”
“I’m not saying another word until we get some vodka in here.”
“Sure,” Milo said, then switched to English. “You hear that? Get us some vodka!”
It took about two minutes. They heard trotting on the stairs, then the door opened just wide enough for Drummond to place a bottle of Finlandia and two shot glasses on the floor. The door shut. Milo poured shots and handed one over. “Budmo.”
“Hey,” Dzubenko answered, then added in English, “Mud inside your eye.”
They each put back two shots before Milo said, “Is this when it happened? You got the story at the embassy?”
“Hell no! You think Xin Zhu’s a complete idiot? That was the next week. I get a call from him, and we head out to Tak-Tak, one of his favorite clubs. Usually, guys like him, they’ll end up at the Budapest Club, maybe Zair, but Tak-Tak? Shit, I’d never been there. But Zhu walked in like a king. They know him there. It’s the one place he can go where he’s the only slant-eye. We get a booth in the corner where we can watch the girls and talk in private. Then he starts drinking. I like to drink-don’t misunderstand me-but this Chinaman puts them away. Unbelievable. I guess because he’s so big he can take it.”
“So he wasn’t drunk?”
“Oh, he was drunk. Easily. He just didn’t pass out.”
“Did you?”
“For a few minutes, yeah.”
“And he talked to you.”
“Like we were brothers. Want to know what I think? I think the fat bastard is lonely. I mean, he can’t really trust anyone under him, and he’s afraid of those above him. So he works his intrigues all by himself.”
“He told you this?”
“I’m a good judge of character.”
“But he told you about his intrigues.”
“A little, yeah. But it wasn’t until the end of the night, when he was really wasted, that he told me this thing that’s got your friend excited. About the mole he’s been running in the fucking-secret American Department of Tourism.”
“Tell me about that, please.”
“Certainly,” Dzubenko said. He raised his shot glass, then drank. “When I told Zhu he was making this up to impress me-really, Department of Tourism? What kind of name is that?-he immediately broke it down. The administration of the Department of Tourism is organized into seven subject areas. One supervisor and nine Travel Agents for each section.” He grinned. “I stopped him there-Travel agents? I said. That’s when he told me they were kind of like analysts, collecting information from Tourism’s field agents, who are called Tourists. There are sixty-three of these guys, these Tourists, spread around the world.”
Sixty-three-not even Milo knew that number. Drummond could verify it later.
“He said that the Department of Tourism was the dirtiest part of America’s filthy intelligence machine.”
“And he said he had a mole in this secret department?”
Dzubenko nodded and held out his empty glass; Milo refilled it.
“He offer any evidence of this?”
“Well, I’ve got some experience in this sort of thing. Learning what’s true and what’s not.”
“I imagine you do.”
“Sure. I knew that with this fat fucker the best thing was to play on his vanity. I told him he was a liar. I told him no one would have a secret department with that kind of name, certainly not the Americans. They’d call it Alpha Bravo. Or Operation Free-Fucking-Eagle. Something like that. We had some girls with us by then-so we talked in English-but in Russian I’d tell the girls he was a big fat liar. You see what I was doing? I was using his manhood to get the evidence from him.”
“Extremely clever,” said Milo. “I suppose he rose to the challenge.”
“You suppose right. First he made me swear to keep my mouth shut-this was just for me. Then he told me about one of the Tourism Department’s operations, in the Sudan. One that was supposed to cripple China’s oil supply. This was back in July, and-get this-it all surrounded the Tiger.”
“The Tiger?” Milo asked, feigning ignorance.
“Come on! You know, that famous assassin. The one who killed the French foreign minister a while back. He was hired by the CIA.” Dzubenko shook his head. “Now, Zhu started with this, which made me doubt him right away, but then he slowly told me the whole story.”
“Which is what you’ll do for me right now.”
For the next hour, Dzubenko told it as he remembered it. He told it the way one tells a story he’s had to repeat often in recent days, playing with red herrings and side characters, knowing that the essential focus will not be lost. He began with the assassin, Benjamin Harris, otherwise known as the Tiger, and his surrender to a man from the department named Milo Weaver, with a message: Someone has killed me with the HIV virus, and I want you to find him. “But that wouldn’t be enough, would it? Not for any Company agent, least of all someone from this fucking-secret department.” Dzubenko was right about that; it hadn’t been enough to get Milo moving. It had taken more. It took the untimely death of an old friend, Angela Yates, and its connection to the Tiger, to make him act. Dzubenko took a drag off his Marlboro. “People are all the same. We need a personal reason to get our asses off the couch.”
He told how an agent in the Department of Homeland Security decided Milo was responsible for Angela’s death, and he had to go on the run. “From Disney World-can you believe it? He was there with his old lady and his kid. Tina, that’s the wife’s name. The daughter was called Stephanie. He had to leave them behind and go black.”
Dzubenko knew about the other players: the Tourist James Einner, the Russian businessman Roman Ugrimov, Diane Morel from French intelligence, and the Tourist Milo had killed, Kevin Tripplehorn, aka, many other names. He knew that it all connected to an attempt to destabilize the Sudanese government by blaming the murder of a radical cleric on the Chinese, who had significant oil interests in that country. Zhu told Dzubenko that the murder itself was one thing-the mullah had been a pain for everyone-but the riots that followed were the real crime. Eighty-six is the official number, Zhu told him, but more died. Innocents. Even a few of our own people, working in the oil fields. There was no need for that.
Zhu knew, further, that the plot had been instigated by Thomas Grainger, then head of Tourism, now deceased, as well as Terence Fitzhugh, also deceased. Both of whom had been directed by a certain senator, Nathan Irwin of Minnesota.
“That was a fuck of a messy month. Don’t get me wrong-we have plenty of messy months ourselves, but we expect a little less bloodletting from the CIA. I mean, you guys have a real budget. It should lead to less corpses, no?”
“It should,” Milo said, all the feeling drained from his limbs. This man knew everything.
“But there was one thing Zhu couldn’t figure out, and it irritated him. This Weaver guy. He was the one who figured out what was going on, and as a result everyone wanted him. Homeland Security wanted him for murder. The Company wanted him dead so the story wouldn’t get out. But this man, Zhu said, he lives the most charmed of lives. He survived. That really confused him. He said Weaver spent a couple months in prison, and his marriage fell apart, but he did survive. Now, not only was he still living and breathing, he was even working for his old employer again. He wanted to know how he pulled off that trick. You know what I told him?”
“I don’t,” said Milo, “but I’d like to know.”
“I told him this Weaver character was obviously working with the bad guys himself. Because the bad guys are the only ones who ever survive. Zhu thought that was pretty funny.”
The truth was that Yevgeny Primakov had helped him stay alive, and it struck him that the question of whether his father was a good guy or a bad guy was just a matter of perspective.
He’d had enough. It wasn’t just that the Chinese knew ninety percent of what had happened last year; it was simply hearing it again, described so vividly, and the way Dzubenko’s words brought back all those mixed feelings of confusion and anger and despair. He stood and offered a hand. “Thanks, Marko. You’ve been a big help.”
“So now will you move me to Wisconsin?”
“Wisconsin?”
“I have a cousin who lived there for two years. The most beautiful place on earth. The best women, too.”
“I didn’t realize,” said Milo. “We’ll see what we can do. You need anything else?”
Dzubenko looked at the full ashtray and the vodka bottle. “Another carton. Maybe some tonic water for mixing-my stomach’s starting to hurt.”
“Maybe you need some food instead.”
“Tonic’s fine.” He picked up the television remote. “It’s good, you know.”
“What?”
“Your Russian. Not that teach-yourself-Russian bullshit most of you Company guys use.”
“Thanks.”
Dzubenko turned on the television and added, “Poka,” an informal good-bye.
“Poka, Marko,” Milo said, and as he closed the door behind himself, he heard a German talk show hostess ask, with utter earnestness, You mean that, after all the things he did, you slept with him again? The studio audience let its contempt show with a synchronized Boo.
Drummond was coming down the stairs. “So?”
“It all fits.”
They stepped onto the dark porch, and cold, erratic gusts hit them. In the distance, against the glow of headlights on the highway, the silhouette of a guard stood smoking a cigarette. In the foreground, the Lincoln started up, but Drummond didn’t bother stepping down to the grass. He didn’t say a thing, so Milo said, “He tells me we have sixty-three Tourists in all. Is that about right?”
“Don’t you know?”
“I used to know how many we had in Europe, but that was my focus. Grainger never shared the big number.”
“It’s the number we’re supposed to have, yes.” He coughed into his hand. “This is some serious bad news, but I want to vet him more before freezing things.”
“Freeze?”
“I don’t want the Chinese picking off our Tourists for sport. If we do have a mole, then I’m using the Myrrh code.”
Myrrh was the universal recall, the order of last resort. “Shouldn’t you wait for a second source?”
“Dzubenko is the second source.”
“What?”
Drummond chewed on something, perhaps the inside of his mouth. “As soon as I got his story, I started asking around. Any Chinese intel on double agents. There were a few leads, but these kinds of rumors are a dime a dozen. They always sound convincing until you ask for compromised material, then they dry up. But a friend over in Asia-Pacific told me about someone they’ve got in the Guoanbu. A woman. She’d been in the Third Bureau, which deals with Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan, for a couple years. Nice, solid source for low-level intel. Then, in late December, there was a personnel shuffle, and she ended up in the Sixth Bureau, counterintelligence, and a small office on the outskirts of Beijing, run by one Xin Zhu.”
“You’re kidding me.”
Drummond shook his head. “Don’t get too excited. Zhu runs his department like al Qaeda runs its operations-in cells. Each individual works on a fragment, completely insulated from the person working at the next desk. This discipline is kept in check by the knowledge-or rumor, it doesn’t matter-that a percentage of them are only there to spy on the others for the boss. Sounds like a dreadful place to work.”
Milo didn’t bother saying that it sounded familiar. “She does have some access, though, right? We could backtrack the intel that crosses her desk.”
Again, he shook his head. “Nothing she’s worked on has dealt with any Western sources. Zhu kept her with her specialty, and the best she gets is occasional dirt on Macau and Taiwanese politicians. Only once did she come across what you and I are interested in. Once. And that was just blind luck, and lust. A couple weeks after she started working there, Zhu’s own secretary, An-ling Shen, began showing interest in her. She let him take her out one night. He’s an insignificant man physically-portly, nearsighted-and knows there’s only one way to woo an attractive younger woman into bed. With secrets. So he told her that his boss, Xin Zhu, had an important source within the CIA.”
Milo waited, but Drummond didn’t continue. “And that’s it?”
“Sadly, she didn’t sleep with him. Her controller asked her to give it a try, but she has her limits. Can’t blame her, though. It might have been a test. That was my friend’s guess, and it would have been mine, too, if it hadn’t been for Marko Dzubenko. But,” he said, sighing a cloud of white, “Marko does exist, and I see it all entirely differently. I believe it.”
“That’s a lot of loose tongues,” Milo pointed out. “Both Zhu and his secretary.”
“People are flawed.”
“What do we have on Xin Zhu?”
“It’s tough getting information out of the Guoanbu. He’s a colonel-we do know that. Late fifties. There was a verified residence in Germany during the early eighties. No wife we know of, but rumors-unverified, so far-of one son. Last mention of his name was in ’96, when the State Council approved a consolidation plan that recalled a lot of their Western undercover agents, the ones living as businessmen and academics and journalists. He was against it, but Jia Chunwang, the minister of state security, gave him a semipublic rebuke. After that, Zhu essentially disappears from the records. His office is a marginal outpost of the Sixth Bureau, and our girl on the inside can’t even tell us the scope of its purpose. Were it not for Marko Dzubenko, we’d just assume Zhu’s department dealt with regional politics.”
“I still don’t buy it,” Milo said. “You’ve got Xin Zhu. By all appearances he’s politically dead in the water. He’s a heavy drinker with a weakness for women. Not only that, but he’s sharing extremely classified information with a nobody-a Ukrainian lieutenant who ends up defecting soon afterward. He’s also got a loose-lipped, horny secretary. How does a man with all these flaws end up a colonel, and a colonel running a mole in our department?”
“You’re not the only one to ask that,” Drummond said after a moment. “The Tourist who first met with Dzubenko brought that up. Which brings us to another theory, one that I’m starting to warm to. It’s that Zhu has reached the end of his rope. After the humiliation of the midnineties, he’s grown bitter. The mole, then, isn’t his. It’s the brainchild of one of his competitors, and he’s sabotaging it to block that person’s career.”
“That would make the drunkenness an act. As well as the secretary’s indiscretions-which would mean that he knows the girl works for us.”
“Or not,” said Drummond. “There’s no way to know. Marko certainly wouldn’t know the difference. In any case, what’s indisputable is that this Chinese colonel shared information he couldn’t have unless he had some kind of connection to Tourism. Do you know what the biggest threat to Tourism is?”
“Other than a mole?”
Drummond shook his head. “Don’t get me wrong. A mole would be a terrible blow. Still, we could reorganize and regroup. Myrrh is a radical decision, but it’s the safest. Bring everyone back, hand out new names and go-codes, replace staff. The crucial thing for us is to keep it quiet. I’ve already assured Ascot that we’ve discounted Marko’s story, so if he gets wind that we really are hunting a mole, he’ll shut us down in a heartbeat.” He stared at Milo significantly. “Everything we do from here on out is under the radar.”
“Understood.”
Drummond chewed the inside of his mouth again. “While a mole would hurt, Tourism could survive. That’s not our biggest threat. The biggest threat to Tourism is knowledge of its existence.”
“Which the Chinese have. So does a Ukrainian lieutenant.”
“They’re not the only ones. The French have an inkling of it, and so do the Brits. There are sites on the Internet that speculate about us, too. Which is as it should be. Right now, Tourism is a myth. It’s a fable that people either consider poppycock or believe in. The believers are terrified that we might exist, because a myth is far more frightening than reality.”
He finally stepped off the porch, and Milo followed him to the car. He moved slowly, and Milo had to measure his steps to avoid bumping into him.
“What do you think would happen if someone popped up with real evidence of our existence? Don’t strain yourself-I’ll tell you. An investigation would be launched. An official one. Senators and representatives would start asking questions. They would wonder just how much we cost-and that answer, as we both know, is embarrassing. We would go from being a frightening story spies tell each other at night to being just another overpriced Company department whose failures start making the newspapers on a regular basis. We would become a joke, just as all the known departments already are. People-American citizens-would start blogging about us and protesting our existence. Tell us what our tax dollars are doing, they would say. And what excuses would we have for our epic budget and the way we have to rob art museums in order to fund ourselves in the crunch times? Please.”
He stopped, and even in the darkness Milo could see his boss’s face was as red as his hands.
“We’d be finished before we got a chance to defend ourselves. Not that we even have a defense.”
They stood in silence broken by the high grass tinkling in the wind and the dull rumble of the Lincoln. Milo felt that he should say something, but he had nothing to say. At this point Drummond seemed to just be thinking aloud, musing over the immediate and more distant future.
“I’ll contact you about Dzubenko’s other stories,” he said finally. “I’ll have you and some other Tourist check their veracity. Who knows? Maybe we’ll find out we have a Ukrainian mole, and the Ukrainians are positioning us to run up against the Chinese.”
“Or maybe there’s no mole at all.”
“Maybe,” said Drummond. “Your cover still computers?”
“Dropped that a while ago-couldn’t sustain a conversation. Expat insurance.”
“You can’t talk computers but you can talk actuarial tables?”
“If forced.”
Drummond grunted amusement but said nothing. When they reached the car, Milo unconsciously opened the door for his boss. Drummond got in and looked up at him. “We’re running things differently now. It’s not the old Tourism anymore.”
“I appreciate that, sir.”
“Maybe you do, maybe you don’t. Anyway, I don’t believe in lying to my employees. If I want something from you, I’ll tell you directly. If I don’t want you to know something, I’ll just tell you it’s above your clearance. What’s important is that you won’t have to do a lot of second-guessing with me-I’m an obvious man.”
He’d said it earnestly, so Milo said, “That means you’re either an idealist-”
“-or a fool,” Drummond finished. “Yeah. I’ve heard it all already. And this thing with the girl, the Moldovan. Not my idea of good foreign policy, but it really was necessary.”
“I’m sure it was,” said Milo.
“I doubt you are. But it’s like any new administration. Before you can move forward you have to take care of the screwups of the previous administration.”
“Maybe you want to tell me why it had to be done.”
“Sorry,” said Drummond. “That’s above your clearance.”
Milo shut the door, then came around the other side and got in beside him. The man behind the wheel began driving along the pocked field toward the main road.
“I’m glad I met you face-to-face,” Drummond told him. “Turns out you’re smarter than your file made you out to be.”
“That’s very reassuring to hear, sir.”
Two days later, Milo broke into a white sedan parked on a secluded street in the northern Milan suburbs, a car that was perfect in its dull inconspicuousness. Some chipped paint on the left flank, a hairline crack down the rear windshield, and just old enough to be un-threatening, but still new enough to play nicely with his magic key ring. With a full tank of gas.
Earlier that day, he had bought an aerosol can of polyurethane from a vast OBI store, and after picking up the car he drove to an address on the Crocetta side of Viale Fulvio Testi, a tall apartment block beside an Esso station. He walked around one side and squatted by the whitewashed wall. He uncapped the can and spray-painted MARIANS JAZZROOM. While wet, it was visible, though once it dried someone would have to look hard to find it.
He tossed the can into a wastebasket and drove north. It was 6:00 P.M., Tuesday.
By eight, he was in a hotel in Melide, Switzerland, just south of Lugano, to rest up before the final stage of the Bührle job. He flipped through television channels, pausing on CNN, where the forty-third president of the United States had been cornered in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. In answer to a reporter’s question, Bush said, “The Kosovars are now independent.”
Drummond’s discussions had obviously gone well.
He wondered idly what Radovan thought of all of this, and suspected he and many of his friends couldn’t help but succumb to a measure of nationalism now that Kosovo, the birthplace of Serbian Orthodoxy, was at stake, but it didn’t matter now. Their fight was dead, and Milo had twenty million dollars to collect.
At one o’clock in the morning, he cleaned the room and put his few spare clothes and toiletries into the hotel’s Dumpster. Before returning the room key, he swallowed two Dexedrine.
At his rented garage in the northern Lugano suburbs, he lit his first Davidoff of the day. He considered the canvases. Degas’s Count Lepic and His Daughters, Monet’s Poppy Field at Vétheuil, van Gogh’s Blooming Chestnut Branches, and Cézanne’s Boy in the Red Waistcoat.
The decision wasn’t about which paintings Milo thought should live or die; the decision was about which paintings meant more to the museum. All four were masterpieces of similar financial value, but there was a difference. Two portrayed nature scenes, while the other two portrayed people. Museum curators and insurance adjusters know that the public’s interest lies with faces; that’s just human nature. Therefore he would give them nature, so that they would act in the hope of saving the faces.
Using gloves, he loaded the sedan with the Monet and van Gogh, then went back inside to examine the remaining two. The boy in the waistcoat looked, at a certain angle, petrified as Milo again took out his Zippo. Necessary, he told himself. Allowing the paintings to survive would only leave him open to risk, leave one more clue for the police to track down. He thought of Adriana and the risk he’d taken letting her survive, and wondered suddenly about Yevgeny’s words. For the old man, killing a girl was a practical necessity, but at the mention of stealing art he’d reached something like a moral core. It’s the social contract you’ve broken, Milo. What kind of man cared more about paintings than a girl’s life?
Nearly two hours later, a little before five, he parked around the corner from the E. G. Bührle, in front of the Psychiatrische Universitätsklinik Zürich. He wiped down the inside of the car, then tossed the keys down by the gas pedal and shut the door. He walked west down Flühgasse to the Tiefenbrunnen commuter train stop and on the way found a pay phone out of the reach of street cameras. Still in gloves, he pulled up the name and number Drummond had texted him, and dialed.
After seven rings, a groggy, irritated voice said, “Ja?”
“Is this Jochem Hirsch?”
“Ja, ja.”
“Wake up, Jochem. I took the paintings from the Bührle museum.”
Silence. Then he asked, “How did you get this number?”
“Listen to me. If you go to the psychiatric clinic just down the street from the museum, you’ll find a white car with Italian plates. Inside it are the Monet and van Gogh.”
“Wait, are you-”
“This is a show of goodwill, Jochem. Two for free. You’ve had a week and a half to learn that you can’t find the paintings on your own, so you know that this is the only way. You’ll have to pay for the Degas and Cézanne. Twenty million in U.S. dollars.”
“Twenty million? I don’t-”
“It’s a deal, Jochem. They’re worth far more than that.”
Jochem Hirsch thought through his options, while in the background a woman’s voice said, “Wer ist da?”
“Shh,” was his reply.
When he spoke again, it was to state the obvious. “Twenty million is still more than you’d get for them. You know that. They’re too famous-no one would pay that much for the risk.”
“I’m not interested in selling them, Jochem. If you don’t pay the money in the next twenty-four hours, then I’ll burn the two remaining paintings. Run that by the investors and see what they think. You have a pen?”
“Wait a minute,” he said, and Milo heard him grunting, moving around his bedroom. “Yes.”
Milo recited the IBAN code he’d given to Drummond. “For your sake, I suggest you don’t share this with the press. Say the paintings were discovered by accident, by a passerby, whatever. Otherwise, half the museums you insure will start having trouble.”
“That’s very considerate of you,” said Jochem Hirsch.
“Twenty-four hours, understand? I won’t call again; you won’t hear a thing. But if the money doesn’t reach the account, then the Degas and Cézanne will be ash.”
He hung up.
The train brought him to the center of town, where he got some breakfast. He was famished, and as he ate he read a copy of Kurier someone had left behind. It was on the front page, which was surprising. There she was, a posed photograph, probably from the high school. Smiling as if nothing bad could ever happen to her.
Of course it was on the front page, he realized as he finished his meal. The Germans, embarrassed retrospectively, would have remembered that they had seen this potentially dangerous man talking to the very girl who’d gone missing. Evidence of foul play was all over it. Yet all Kurier said was that she had been seen leaving the school but had not appeared on the other side of the block, where her father had been waiting. There was nothing about Sebastian Hall or Gerald Stanley.
The Germans, he imagined, had checked in with the Company administrator that had put them onto him. Alan Drummond would have asked them to please keep it quiet.
His food settled heavily in his stomach, and as he laid down Swiss francs for the bill he took out his cell phone and typed out a message.
Check acct tomorrow this time. Will be offline until Saturday.
He sent the message, then turned off his phone, lest it receive an immediate reply, and removed the battery. On the way to the Hauptbahnhof, he picked up a copy of Le Figaro because he saw a photo of the dejected parents, Andrei and Rada Stanescu, dazed by photographers’ lights. The French newspaper had printed a translation of Rada’s public plea, which had been broadcast on German television:
I want to speak to the person who took Adriana. You know who you are. You can put right the wrong you have done to her, and to my husband and myself, by placing her somewhere safe now. You don’t have to put yourself at risk by going to a police station or a post office. You can put her in a church, or somewhere with a pay phone and money so she can call us. We’ll pick her up. That’s all you have to do to end this.
Milo popped two more Dexedrine, wiped some ash off his sleeve, and boarded the eleven thirty train to Paris.
By Friday, his anxiety had nothing to do with Adriana Stanescu, a possible mole in Tourism, the art extortion that was now complete (AP reported that a clinic employee had noticed the two paintings in the backseat of an abandoned car), nor even the fact that Alan Drummond would be fuming because he’d gone offline. Those were nothing beside this interminable wait in the Manhattan rain while students with knapsacks and cell phones passed him in pairs and solo. Those old worries meant nothing compared to this.
For the first time in months, he knew exactly why he was here. “Here” was the grounds of Columbia University, across from the high, majestic columns of the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library on a drizzling but unseasonably warm afternoon. The trench coat he’d picked up at Macy’s that morning kept his body dry, but he was still shivering. He had resisted the urge for more Dexedrine; a clouded head was the last thing he wanted.
One thing that might have helped him now was self-righteousness, an emotion common to men who’ve been rejected by their wives. In some men it leads to harassing calls or intrusions at four in the morning, or even haunting a loved one’s place of work, as Milo was doing now. Self-righteousness had never been part of Milo Weaver’s repertoire, though, and if Tina came out now and told him to leave, he would do so without argument-he felt sure of this. Self-righteousness is born of the conviction that you deserve something from someone; Milo, on the other hand, didn’t believe anyone owed him a thing.
His crime had been secrecy.
Among other things, he had hidden the identities of his parents-his real parents-from her. Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Primakov and Ellen Perkins. One a Soviet spy Milo briefly lived with in Moscow during his teenaged years; the other, his mother, a 1979 suicide in a German prison, someone described, alternately, as a Marxist terrorist, a mentally disturbed nomad, or-as he thought of her-a ghost.
Milo’s lies (or, generously: omissions) might have been bearable had he confessed them on his own, but he hadn’t. Tina had learned the truth from strangers, and the humiliation had been too much for her.
Therefore, the fault was his, and reconciliation was something he did not deserve. He hadn’t needed a marriage counselor to tell him that.
Yet when, a little after five thirty, he spotted her trotting down those few front steps, phone to her ear, he had to stop himself from rushing forward to kidnap her. That was his Tourist side, demanding what he desired. He followed her around the corner to the car, where she hung up and got behind the wheel. He broke into a jog and appeared at her window. She was starting the engine, not looking at him, so he tapped the glass by her head. She turned and let out an involuntary shout.
Neither moved. The engine rumbled, and she stared at him, her green eyes comically widened in shock, her soft lips separated, one hand over her heart as if pledging allegiance. He wondered if he looked different to her, if the last three months had altered his features. He knew he’d lost weight, and in a rush of vanity he hoped it made him more attractive. He hoped-and the thought later struck him as ludicrous-that the man she saw through her window aroused her desire. The woman he saw aroused his.
She didn’t open the door, just rolled down the window-she wasn’t giving in yet. “Oh, shit. Milo.”
“Hey.”
“Well, what,” she said. “You’re in town?”
“Not really. Just a few hours. To see you.” When she didn’t answer, he thought that maybe he was taking too much control, being too forceful, so he added, “If that’s all right with you.”
“Well. Sure.”
“Are you picking up Stef?”
“Mom’s in town-she’s taking care of that.” She paused. “Were you wanting to see her?”
There was nothing he wanted more than to see his daughter, that single spark of Technicolor in his grayscale existence, but he shook his head. “Probably not a good idea. I have to leave again pretty quickly. I don’t want to upset her.”
He hoped she noticed how considerate he was being now. Not like last year when he’d demanded that they disappear with him.
He said, “Look, I don’t want to keep you.”
“Get in.” She pressed a button to unlock the doors. “I can drop you off on the way.”
He ran around to the passenger side before she could change her mind.
In the old days, he always drove. This was her seat, and behind them Stephanie would sit, asking inopportune questions. He realized that he had seldom watched her drive, and was impressed by how smoothly she pulled out of her parallel parking situation. She seemed to be doing just fine without him.
“How’s Little Miss?”
“She’s all right,” Tina began, then shook her head. “Not entirely. She’s been cracking her knuckles.”
“Who’d she pick that up from?”
“She doesn’t even know she’s doing it. It’s a nervous tic.”
Six-year-olds weren’t supposed to have nervous tics, Milo thought as he felt the desire for a pill. “She feels anxiety in the house,” he said.
“Because you’re not there? Maybe. The counselor says it’s common in divorced families.”
“We’re not divorced.”
“Maybe it’s something else. She’s been having nightmares.”
“Oh.”
Tina nodded at the road. “Did you hear about that kid in Germany? Adriana Something? Just another kidnapped girl, but it’s all over the news here. She had a nightmare about it last night. About being kidnapped.”
Milo really wanted that Dexedrine.
“She’ll get over it. Besides, it’s being replaced with Olympic fever,” she said to the road. “They’ve been talking it up at school, learning about the Greeks and Beijing. Stef’s crazy for the javelin throw-it’s really fired her imagination. Dana Pounds is her hero.”
“Dana Pounds?”
“One of our javelin throwers-or whatever you call them. Stef’s anxious about her upcoming trials.” She grinned. “Patrick keeps threatening to take us.”
“To Beijing?” he said, terrified of the image that provoked.
“That’s what he says,” she said, shrugging into a turn, “but you know him. When you’ve got him in front of you, he’ll do anything. Once he’s out the door, he’s really out the door.”
He said nothing at first, because he didn’t want to speak too quickly, too unthinkingly. He reassessed his terror. Though Patrick, Stephanie’s biological father, was hardly an ideal role model, the fact was that Milo couldn’t take her to the Olympics. Patrick was her only chance. And the Chinese themselves? The mole? According to Dzubenko, they knew about Milo Weaver’s family and could easily pick them out of a crowd of thousands, but that didn’t mean they would be in danger. Families were neutral ground in their trade. “I hope he follows through,” he admitted finally. “It’s something she’d never forget. Hell, you’d never forget it. You should call his bluff, let him catch you boning up on Mandarin.”
She laughed. “I just might do that.”
“Yevgeny said he’s come by a few times. Is that right?”
She nodded at the traffic ahead. “I think he does it just to see Stef. He’s nuts about her. Says she reminds him of his daughters. When they were little, at least.”
“And you? You like him?”
“He’s very… European, isn’t he?”
“I suppose so.”
“And he’s crazy about you. Reminds me of Tom, always making excuses for your shortcomings.”
He scratched at an itch on the back of his head. She seemed to be turning the conversation in a bleak direction. “Does he need to?”
“Sometimes, yeah. Sometimes I get pretty pissed off.” She shook her head. “I don’t want to get into that argument again, okay?”
“Okay.”
“We’ve been through all of it,” she continued, as if she actually did want to get into it again. “I still get angry sometimes, but it’s not because I don’t understand. I get it. You made it clear with Dr. Ray. You’d been living all your life with this secret side, and it never really occurred to you to share it with me.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Something like that.”
“And that’s the problem, isn’t it?”
He didn’t understand, so she explained. “You didn’t make a conscious decision to keep it a secret; the idea of sharing it simply never entered your mind.” She took a breath. “That makes it worse. It means that it’s hardwired into you. It’s something that’ll never change.”
“People can change. Remember? Dr. Ray said that, too.”
“Before you suddenly decided to return to the field without even running it by me? Or before she told you that you weren’t taking our sessions seriously enough?”
Suddenly, this transatlantic visit felt like a mistake. It was as if she were looking for reasons to reject him, milking them out of whatever new facts she had discovered. The truth, though, was that Milo still didn’t understand. “You need more time?” he asked.
“Time for what?” She glanced at him. “You’re working in Europe again. If we give the marriage another try, then what kind of marriage are we talking about? I’m still not interested in moving, you know. I like my job. I like the life I’ve got here. Stephanie’s in a great school.”
He rubbed his face. Despite the many times he’d planned and played this conversation in his head, she was irritating him. “Why do I have to have all the answers? Why can’t we just play it by ear?”
“Because we have a child, Milo.”
All the air seemed to leave the car.
She gave him a quick look. “What did you think would happen here? Did you think we’d fall in love all over again and you’d return to your… I don’t know. Do you even have a home?”
He didn’t answer. It was out of his hands now.
“Maybe you think we can have some kind of satisfying long distance relationship. But tell me: Could we really depend on you showing up for birthdays and holidays? You’re not working a nine-to-five.” She stopped at a light. “Unless you’re quitting. Is that it?”
“Not yet,” he managed.
Silence followed, and after they’d gotten moving again she spoke more softly. “I’ve had a lot of time to think about things, and one thing I couldn’t understand was myself. Why didn’t I go with you back in July? My husband comes to me, tells me his life is in danger, and the only way we can all stay together is if we leave the country. You made it very clear, Milo. An idiot could have understood.”
He waited.
“I couldn’t understand why my ‘no’ had come so easily. There were plenty of practical reasons, but those weren’t enough. It was my unconscious making the decisions, and my unconscious knew that, even without all the melodrama, there was something wrong in the marriage. Maybe I’d never really trusted you in the first place. Maybe my love had its limits. I don’t know, and I still don’t. All I know is that if we got back together it couldn’t stay the way it was. It would take work. We’d have to work together to figure out what was wrong and then see if we can fix it. Not that one-sided therapy we were doing before, but real, engaged therapy we’re both committed to.”
She knew how to make him feel as if he’d lost control of a debate; all she had to do was use that word of hers, “unconscious.” It made her into the adult, standing alongside Dr. Ray; it made him into the child. And as if he were indeed a child, a swift fantasy took hold, a shallow reasoning: She was confused. She was confusing herself. Their marriage had gone so well for six years, and now that a few problems had appeared she’d lost faith. Patrick-yes, her ex was obviously deluding her. So Milo would take control. He would get her to pull over and then overpower her. He would move her to a place where he had control, where he would have the time and means to convince her of her bad logic, because that’s all it was-bad logic. It left out love, and any logic that ignored love was flawed from the outset.
Then the fantasy left, as quickly as it had lumbered into his head, and he knew that this had been the problem all along-he’d been thinking like a Tourist. For Tourists, everything is possible; contradictions are minor inconveniences. Tourists, like children, believe the world is theirs. He hadn’t been like this before. The job had infantilized him.
She said, “I asked him. Yevgeny. I asked him if you could just leave your job and come back. Just like you, he said, Not yet. He said you needed more time.” She waited for him to dispute that. He didn’t. “Remember what I told you before? When we met, you were a field agent, but if you’d stayed one I wouldn’t have married you. I’m not the kind of wife who can take long absences, or worry that my husband won’t make it home at all. So, you know what I told Yevgeny? I told him that when you quit running around the world, when you finally fall back on the name you were born with, then you should come and see me. Did he tell you that?”
“No,” Milo said.
“Well, he should have. You wouldn’t have wasted a trip.”
She pulled up outside the Franklin Avenue A-train station in Brooklyn, from which he could ride to Howard Beach and take the AirTrain to JFK. For a full minute they sat in that awkward silence of farewell. He sat hating Yevgeny for offering him the unrealistic hope that is the lifeblood of the desperate.
Then, perhaps taking pity, Tina tugged on his sleeve, muttering, “Come here.” She pulled him close and kissed him hard on the mouth. She tasted of chewing gum. Though he knew that it was pity, he would take it in lieu of anything else. They lingered for a moment; then she pulled back. “I mean what I said. You get your life straight, come back home, and I’m willing to give it a try. But here, you understand? Not in some other country with fake names. And we work on it with Dr. Ray.”
“I understand.”
“I hope you do, mister.”
He grinned. She had offered him a plan. “Give Stef my love.”
“You sure about that?”
“Maybe you’re right,” he admitted. “I’ll give it to her myself when I can stay more than a few hours.”
A brief smile joined them; then Tina jolted. “Oh! Take this.” She popped open the glove compartment and fished out the iPod he’d given her months before, with headphones and a car-lighter charger.
“No. It’s yours.”
“Please,” she insisted. “I never listen to the damned thing, and a few weeks ago I dropped it. Broke it. Pat got it fixed, but… look, all your music got wiped.”
“After Pat touched it?”
“Ha ha. He filled it before giving it back, but I still don’t listen. So, please, take it back. He filled it with seventies crap-you’d like it. Besides, I can’t really imagine you running around the world without it.”
He held it in his hand. “Thanks. I mean it. And don’t give up on the Olympics. The more I think of it, the better the idea sounds. Tell Pat to get those tickets before they sell out.”
“I’ll do that,” she said and let him kiss her again. Once he was standing on the wet sidewalk, she lowered the window. “One last thing.”
“Yeah?”
“Cut out the smoking, will you? You taste like an ashtray.” She winked and raised the window as she drove away.
He boarded a slow train, not worrying about the time. In the cool cloud of his hope-the better hope that she had offered him-he wasn’t in a hurry to do anything. There was always a chance, even for louts like himself. He would catch an outbound flight with his Tourist passport, and even hope that Drummond was keeping watch, and that this unscheduled visit with his wife would provoke his anger, and perhaps lead to a quick dismissal.
It would weaken Adriana Stanescu’s position with his father, but for the moment he didn’t care. He’d regained that lack of empathy that Tourism drills into you.
Who knew? Maybe by morning he’d be free.
When switching trains at Howard Beach, he gave the rest of his Davidoffs to a beggar, and at JFK he purchased a ticket to Paris with his Sebastian Hall credit card. He joined the line at the security check. In front of and behind him anxious travelers sighed and grunted as they removed their shoes and unpacked their laptops and undid their belts. Milo followed suit, though he carried no luggage.
Off to the left, propped against a thick column, a television was tuned to CNN. An urban night scene: A familiar-looking building was billowing smoke. He read the rolling newsfeed at the bottom of the screen. It was the U.S. embassy in Belgrade on the previous night. Protesters had broken in and set it ablaze.
As the line brought him nearer, he heard the commentator explain that the riot was in reaction to President Bush’s validation of Kosovo’s independence in Dar es Salaam. There was a sign: KOCOBO JE CPБJA. KOSOVO JE SRBIJA-Kosovo is Serbia. One protester had turned up dead in the building, overcome by the smoke of the fire he’d been setting. Milo hoped that Radovan and his mother were all right.
He passed through the metal detector and received his shoes and disassembled phone (which got an extrasuspicious examination from the X-ray operator), then continued into the international terminal, where he had a coffee to brighten himself up. He put the phone back together, but no one called, so he scrolled through the iPod’s playlist. It wasn’t a random selection of the seventies as Tina had thought, but the entire David Bowie discography, from his self-titled 1967 release until 2003’s curiously titled Reality. Not knowing where to begin, he put it on shuffle and soon found himself whispering, “Modern love…”
Not until he was at the gate itself did he begin to think something was wrong. It came to him via two faces. One man, he thought, was French… or Albanian. The conflicting nationalities seemed to find a shared home in his features as he looked back at Milo with a forced nonchalance. Then the woman-she was standing by a column, talking on a cell phone, gazing at the window near where Milo was sitting. Her face seemed entirely American to him. Neither carried any luggage.
Only two faces, but they did not belong. He saw that in the way they interacted with their surroundings, as if they had no interest in the plane that taxied to the gate. The verification came a half hour later, as he stood in line with the other passengers, shuffling to where the flight attendants checked passports and tickets. Milo’s attendant ran his ticket through the scanner, which gave back a disappointed tone. She tried it again with the same result, then directed him to the desk, where he was told that, unfortunately, the plane was overbooked. There was another flight leaving in two hours. Would he like to wait for it?
Milo considered protesting, but seeing the man and woman waiting among the now empty seats, he really didn’t care. That’s what hope can do to you.
“Sure,” he said. “I can wait a couple hours.”
Her smile showed that she appreciated his understanding.
As she worked on his new itinerary, he glanced back to see the woman lean down to speak to the man. Her jacket fell open to reveal the grip of a pistol in a shoulder holster. The man twisted in his seat to stare directly at Milo. He stood up. The ruse was over.
Milo thought, Drummond must really be pissed.
“Don’t worry about the reservation,” he told the clerk. “I’ll take care of it later.”
She was baffled. “What?”
He was already heading toward the couple, who met him halfway. The woman spoke.
“Come with us, please, Mr. Hall.”
The French-Albanian grunted his agreement, then followed him while the woman led the way through a locked door by a shop full of NYC caps and T-shirts and into the secret back corridors of JFK.
Unlike many of the guests these corridors were built for, he wasn’t pushed through with a hood over his head, and for that he was grateful. They took so many turns that, when they finally deposited him in a windowless room with an aluminum prison toilet in the corner, he had no idea where he was. They left him to think over his flaws. There were so many, he didn’t know where to begin. So he thought about Tina, but that inevitably drew him back to his flaws, and Dr. Ray, on whom the marriage now depended. The truth, which Tina had no way of knowing, was that their sessions would never truly work until Milo quit being so dishonest.
His dishonesty didn’t take the form of outright lies but of silence, and it was something Dr. Ray sometimes noted, saying, “Milo? Would you like to add something to that?” Milo would usually answer, “No, I think Tina covered it pretty well,” even when she hadn’t.
A case in point was Tina’s description of how they had met and fallen in love more than six years ago. The story had all the elements of high melodrama. Tina, eight months pregnant and single, in Venice for a last vacation. She meets an older man, a gentleman, who it turns out has stolen millions of dollars from the U.S. government. He brings her along to a meeting that goes disastrously wrong. Milo and Angela Yates, his partner, are there to arrest the man, and a teenaged girl is thrown off a high balcony to her death. Shots fired-Milo is hit twice-and the stress brings on Tina’s labor.
The convergence of all these events made the story absolutely unbelievable, but Milo had no argument with Tina’s retelling of those facts. They happened. It was during the mundane part of the story, the epilogue, that their versions differed. Tina woke in her Italian hospital room to find Milo asleep in a chair beside her bed and saw on the television that two planes had hit the World Trade Center. Milo woke up, and they watched together, and then…
“The event, it joined us in a way that nothing else could. Two strangers. We’d just been through a terrible moment together, and then we were witness to something even worse, grander. It tied us together forever. I know that sounds corny, but it’s true. We fell in love at that moment.”
“Milo? Anything to add?”
“What could I possibly add to that?” he’d said, though he’d been thinking the same thing he thought every time she retold that story: That’s the most ludicrous thing I’ve ever heard.
Milo stared at the bare walls and felt desire. Not for Tina, or even escape, but for that pack of cigarettes he’d optimistically ditched at Howard Beach.
A pair of suits arrived, ignored his request for dinner, and led him out. More hidden corridors, then he was taken outside to where the whine of planes soaked the cold, wet air. A black Ford Explorer awaited them, and he climbed into the back. The two men joined him on either side, and another put the SUV into gear and began to drive.
Questions are only useful when the answers will lead somewhere. In this case, there was no point. He’d jumped the Tourist train, and now he was going to pay for it.
They stopped near one of the domestic terminals, and Drummond climbed into the passenger seat, wearing a disheveled tux. Milo wondered if he’d been dragged from the opera, but it was two in the morning. He didn’t bother looking at Milo, just pointed at the windshield, and the driver got going again.
“You seriously fucked up, Hall.”
Milo didn’t answer; he was serene.
“Did you think we wouldn’t know? That we wouldn’t figure it out?”
Milo cleared his throat; his hunger had subsided. “Did you get the money?”
A pause, then he said, “Yes, we got it. Kudos on a fine job there.” Another pause, longer this time, and when Drummond spoke again he turned to face Milo. “Who do you think you are? Don’t let your job title go to your head. I knew where you were as soon as you sent that last message from Zürich. We watched you hop the train to Paris, where you lifted a passport, then wander around Charles de Gaulle waiting for your plane. They’re called video cameras. You used the passport of a Monsieur Claude Girard-he looked enough like you for it to work. JFK? Simple stuff. You were followed all the way to Columbia.”
“I didn’t know seeing your family was a crime.”
That was greeted by the rumble of engines and wheels humming across tarmac. Beyond the driver the colored lights of airplanes taxied endlessly in the blackness.
A queer grin filled Drummond’s face. “When I found out who you were meeting, I called off the tail. I’m not an ogre. An employee feels the need to take a day to see his wife, that’s not a problem. You’d finished your work, and the next assignment hadn’t been sent yet. Sure, I was pissed off that you did it behind my back, but you guys are paranoid. It’s to be expected. No. Visiting your wife wasn’t a problem. This,” he said, lifting a gray folder from his lap. “This is the problem. Adriana Stanescu.”
“Oh.”
“Who were you working with? Who was holding her?”
Milo looked at the guard to his right, who had a military buzz cut and a wide, clean-shaven jawline. Neither he nor the one to his left carried a gun, which made this somehow less tragic. The doors just beyond them were unlocked. Though he had no plans to make a break for it, he charted possible escape routes, figuring where he had to land blows, and in what order, to get out of here-and in which direction, then, to run, but this geometry of escape was only academic, a way of distracting him from the question.
“Well?”
“Some guys. From the Bührle job.”
“Their names?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It does to me.”
So Milo gave him two names-the German, Stefan, and the Italian, Giuseppe-then changed the subject. “Where did you find her?”
“You don’t know?”
“I didn’t have time to find a safe house, so it was up to those two. Where was it?”
“France. In the mountains.”
“Which ones?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
It does to me, Milo wanted to say, but Drummond was right. The details were beside the point. He should have known from the start that, once the frustrations of temporary parenthood kicked in, Yevgeny Primakov would cut and run. Let the girl go, and let Milo face the consequences. Perhaps he’d decided that, son or not, Milo’s occasional intel wasn’t worth the trouble.
Milo was struck by another How did I end up here? moment, because even in his business it was a strange thing for your own father to cheat you.
He considered giving up the old man’s name. It would end his obligations, making his job so much easier. He could give more, too: Yevgeny Primakov, my father, is running a shadow agency within the United Nations. That would certainly ruin Yevgeny’s day.
Milo wasn’t ready for that level of vindictiveness, though. Not yet. Nor was he ready to be turned into a triple agent, informing on Yevgeny, which was the least Drummond would demand.
“Will you put her back?” Milo asked.
“What?”
“Adriana. I failed that test, but there’s no need to make her pay for it. Drop her off somewhere in Berlin and let it go.”
They had reached the end of the tarmac, far past the airport buildings, and the driver turned the Explorer in a long arc and headed back again. Drummond’s grin had returned, and he said to the driver, “Do you hear this guy?”
He rocked his head in a kind of answer.
To Milo, he said, “Test? What are you talking about?”
“Enough, Alan. There was no reason to kill that girl, not unless you had a Tourist you couldn’t trust. Not unless you wanted a last test before you put him on to more serious work.”
“Ha ha.” The laugh sputtered forcibly out, and Drummond had to wipe spittle from his lips. “Christ, the ego on this man! You think I’d kill a teenager just to find out if you were loyal? Do you really think that?”
Milo just stared.
“Jesus, Weaver,” he said, mistakenly letting his real name slip out. “The whole world really does revolve around you, doesn’t it?” He shook his head. “No. I knew it would be tough on you, sure, but we wanted her killed for the most excellent of reasons.”
“What’s the most excellent of reasons, then?”
Drummond considered him a moment, then shrugged. “The future of our relationship with German intelligence, if you must know. With her alive, we remain out in the cold. With her death, we’re in.”
The geometry of escape left him, replaced by some weird algebra of cause and effect. “I don’t get it.”
“Because there’s no need for you to get it. I’m not here to connect the dots for you. Just know that what you did put the entire transatlantic relationship in jeopardy.”
“So you’re going to kill her anyway?”
“You haven’t been reading the papers,” said Drummond. “Adriana Stanescu’s body was found only hours ago-late Thursday night, I mean. All of Europe is in mourning, or so the newspapers would have you believe. Me, I kind of doubt most of Europe gives a damn about a Moldovan girl, but I’m like that. I suspect most people, particularly in that racist backwater across the ocean.”
It was too much to keep straight; he couldn’t chart the repercussions of everything he’d just heard. So he said the first thing that came to mind. “Who did it?”
“That’s something we’d all like to know.”
They pulled up to one of the terminals-he’d lost track of which was which-and parked beside a tall figure illuminated briefly in the headlights. Hat, long overcoat. Drummond said, “Time to meet your babysitter,” and then the men on either side of Milo got out of the Explorer. The one on his right left the door open so the tall figure could climb in beside him. “I think you know Mr. Einner?”
He had last seen James Einner the previous July in Geneva. Milo had attacked him in his hotel bathroom, bound him in duct tape, and wrapped him in a shower curtain. Hatred or anger hadn’t motivated his actions, just expediency. In fact, he liked James Einner.
“James,” he said, smiling.
In James Einner’s memories, however, the humiliation of that July incident colored everything, and when Milo stuck out a hand to shake, Einner planted a swift fist into the center of Milo’s face, knocking him back against the far door. Shock, then pain, filled Milo’s features.
Mildly, Drummond said, “Now, James.”
Einner raised both his hands, his long fingers dancing merrily and his bright blue eyes twinkling. “All done, sir.”
The pain poured into Milo’s nose now. His eyes were awash in tears, and he tasted blood. “You fucka,” said Milo. “You bwoke my nose.”
Einner took a silk handkerchief out of his pocket and handed it over, still smiling.
“Meet your babysitter, Sebastian. He’ll be your partner while you vet Marko Dzubenko’s tales. Unlike me, Einner doesn’t have a soft spot for old farts like you. He’ll cut your throat at the first sign of disloyalty. Isn’t that right, James?”
“You’ve got that right, sir.”
With the handkerchief pressed to his leaking nose, Milo looked back and forth between these two men, and to the driver, who was trying hard not to laugh. As he tilted his head back to avoid too much mess, he was consumed by hatred. Not for Drummond, or even James Einner, but again for Yevgeny Primakov, who had abandoned his parental responsibilities as soon as they had become inconvenient. Yevgeny’s abandonment was nothing new, but that made it no less appalling.
They were sitting seven rows apart in coach, another sign of Tourism’s budget constraints, and James Einner looked comfortable in his pin-striped, and not very cheap, Tom Ford suit (a ludicrous expense since most Tourists tossed their clothes after a couple of wearings), while Milo was stuffed into an ill-fitting and starchy Italian suit. Correctly predicting that the clothes Milo had picked up back in Zürich wouldn’t be presentable by the time he left JFK-blood spatter didn’t sit well with any country’s passport control-Drummond had brought him the suit, as well as a wheeled Baggallini tote full of necessities: the official “Tourism kit” most Tourists soon realized was too cumbersome for the life.
Once they had boarded this American Airlines flight to London, Milo plugged himself into his iPod, pressed a complimentary napkin to his nostrils, and tilted his head back as far as it would go. He closed his eyes and listened to David Bowie, circa 1972:
News guy wept and told us,
Earth was really dying
He wasn’t angry about the punch-he’d deserved it. Last year’s fight with Einner had been particularly humiliating for the younger man, who’d been dragged off a toilet in the middle of a bowel movement, then wrapped in a shower curtain, pants around his ankles, stained with his own shit.
The real shock was that he was still here. Drummond hadn’t released him from Tourism; the morning hadn’t found him free of all this. Now he even had a chaperone to make sure he didn’t step out of line.
Somewhere over the Atlantic, they met by the bathrooms. Einner said, “If you’re waiting for me to apologize, then forget it.”
Milo gave him a generous smile and looked at the dried blood on the napkin; the flow was finished. “I’m just wondering why I’m still employed. Drummond doesn’t trust me.”
Einner rocked his head from side to side, then made room for a stewardess to pass. He whispered, “You know how many Tourists we’ve got in Europe right now?”
Back when he’d been in administration, twelve had been the default number, but there’d been cutbacks. “Eight?”
“Five,” said Einner. “Including you and me. We lost three in the last few months, and one of us five is laid up in a hospital in Stockholm.”
“He told you all this?”
“This guy’s not like Grainger. I know the old man was your friend, but he was a goddamned sphinx when it came to sharing information. And Mendel-you dealt with him, right?”
Milo nodded.
“You got a little more information from him, but it’s like he was always leaving out the most important detail. Drummond, though…” He faded off a moment. “He’s trying to make you a partner with him. I like it, this new Tourism.”
“So what else has he told you?”
Einner wagged a finger. “You’re not going to get me that easily. Just know that the situation has saved your ass. We can’t afford to lose any more Tourists, not even ones as washed up as you.”
“We.”
“What?”
“You said we can’t afford to lose Tourists. Drummond really does have you thinking you’re partners. It’s fantastic.”
Einner waved off his cynicism and wandered off. Milo envied his belief in the new Tourism, the Tourism of “we.”
Because of air traffic, they had to float for a half hour over Heathrow before finally descending at nine Saturday night. Milo hadn’t been able to sleep at all, so when they finally approached the gate, he was flagging, and Einner looked noticeably young and alert among the tired passengers shuffling off the plane. They continued separately down the labyrinth of corridors to the crowded border control, where, after twenty minutes’ wait, an overly polite official said, “You have an accident, sir?”
“Excuse me?”
He tapped the side of his nose.
“Back in America. I’ll survive.”
“Then please enjoy yourself, Mr. Hall. And try not to have any accidents here.”
He felt itchy and clammy in his starched suit as he moved through the throng of real-world tourists, but it was another rule of Tourism that, when traveling, one should look as much like a businessman as possible, like someone who has come to invest in the host nation, who has money to blow, who has no patience for customs delays and might easily take his gold card elsewhere. As young and old tourists flushed in the face of hard questions from British customs, Milo passed unmolested, pulling the Baggallini behind him.
In preparation for the next day, he perused the stores in Terminal 3 and bought a T-shirt with a silhouette of London across it, white sports socks, and sunglasses. He took the escalator back down to the arrivals level and joined a twenty-minute taxi queue.
As he finally made his way into the redbrick metropolis, to Piccadilly and Mayfair, he considered his situation. His new boss looked upon him with suspicion, and James Einner, despite their past camaraderie, was here to threaten him each step of the way. Why should he put up with this? Why not ask the driver to turn back to Heathrow? He could dump his phone in a wastebasket and buy a ticket back to his family.
Adriana was gone-but only a fool could believe that it set him free of anything other than guilt, and it didn’t even do that.
The reason he remained, like the reason Drummond hadn’t fired him, was far more practical than the safety of a Moldovan girl: He wasn’t sure he could survive the exit interview.
These extended interrogations went on for weeks as you spilled everything you had done and seen, accounted for all your absences and contacts, and made a general accounting of the money you’d spent. The Company didn’t spend so much on Tourists just to have them walk away. It wanted to squeeze every dollar out of each Tourist before setting him free. Milo knew this because he’d once supervised the exit interviews himself. He knew how an interrogator sniffed out inconsistencies like a truffle dog burrowing under wet leaves.
And what if he did make it? What if he survived weeks of interrogation, and by some stroke of luck they didn’t find a way to connect him to his father, his confessor, and charge him with treason? What then? Would Drummond really trust him to keep his mouth shut about his work? Tom Grainger would have-but Grainger had been an old friend. Drummond had only met Milo twice, once to congratulate him, once to reprimand him. There were limits to the new Tourism, but Milo had no idea where they lay.
Before entering the modern Cavendish Hotel, he found a Boots pharmacy. What he wanted was a pack of Davidoffs, but the only way to keep going was to hold on to the promise of a future. He’d decided on the flight to end his relationship with Dexedrine, and in the pharmacy asked the cashier for a box of Nicorette gum, the “fresh mint” flavor. He ripped open the box as he returned to the hotel. He chewed two, the rush of eight milligrams of nicotine bringing on hiccups at the front desk, and his desire for a cigarette ebbed. Predictably, though, it was nowhere near as good as the real thing.
He woke at six and checked his nose. It wasn’t actually broken. He could breathe through it, but it was bruised a faint purple and slightly swollen, which would make his surveillance that much harder.
Beneath his suit and tie he wore the London T-shirt and a pocket held the white socks. He took the half-empty Sunday morning tube to Hampstead, then walked up to East Heath Road. Among the facades looking out over the park was an inconspicuous Georgian belonging to a man named Edward Ryan.
There were two London vignettes within Dzubenko’s stories, and Milo had been assigned to verify one that focused on a man the newspapers commonly described as “xenophobic, racist, and nationalist,” much like the political party he headed. Despite having been the subject of exposés by the Guardian and BBC’s Panorama linking it and its leader to pro-Nazi movements, the party had gained 4.6 percent in the most recent round of local elections.
Drummond had briefed him in the Explorer at JFK while Einner, still beside him, listened. Assumedly, he had received his brief beforehand. Drummond first showed Milo a photograph of a trim, gray-tinted Englishman in a bowler. “Edward Ryan, national chairman of the Union of British Nationals. According to Marko, he’s on the receiving end of Russian money funneled through the SSU. Essentially, Moscow’s funding the revitalization of the UBN. Once the party gets a member into Parliament, Moscow can point to the growing racism in England. That in turn will energize the anger of British Muslims and lead to deeper divisions. That’s long-term. In the meantime, Moscow and Kiev get inside information on the Labour Party, which the UBN regularly spies on.”
Beside him, Einner said knowingly, “Why risk sending in your own people, when a bunch of xenophobes will do it for you?”
The question, of course, was how to verify that this was true. On that point, Drummond repeated Dzubenko’s own suggestion. “On the second to last Sunday of each month, Ryan passes Labour Party information to the SSU’s representative, who he thinks is a Ukrainian businessman sharing his interest in racial purity. You will shadow him, and if he meets the representative you’ll ID him for me.”
“The head of the party does this?” Milo asked doubtfully.
“Trust, Marko tells us, is in short supply in the UBN. He’d rather do it himself.”
Ryan’s Sunday itinerary was no secret. An adoring interviewer had, in December, spelled it out in order to show what a busy and important man the politician was. At eight o’clock, he went for a jog on the Heath. By ten thirty, he was in his front pew for the Anglican St. John-at-Hampstead’s parish Eucharist, having walked the distance along busy Heath Street, where the occasional supporter (few and far between in an area full of liberals and Muslims and Jews) could shake his hand. When the interviewer asked how a man of his high principles could take part in the services of a church with a reputation for encouraging multicultural and interreligious cohesion, Ryan smiled and said, “My community is my community. The effort to clean white Britain must begin on our own streets.”
Afterward, like any respectable family man, he returned home for tea and newspapers, then took his two sons, six and nine, to whatever Sunday activity had been decided upon that week.
Milo had been over the schedule the previous night, considering where Ryan might best hand over information. Each place, it seemed, was perfect. The expanse of Hampstead Heath was classic dead-letter drop territory. Pass-offs could be made all along Heath Street, and it was part of the nature of church that its members mingled and whispered to one another. Children’s events, as Milo knew, divided instantly into children on one side and parents on another, and the parents quickly sank into lengthy chats. There were any number of ways for Ryan to pass on information, if he were going to pass on anything at all.
Milo found a spot in the park and pressed his phone to his ear, so that in his suit he looked like a churchgoer involved in early business. He drifted to some bushes and used the camera phone to zoom in on the front of the house. Tourism had long ago eschewed the high-end phones that were a magnet for thieves, instead making its own adjustments to mundane models, like increasing the camera range and resolution of this store-bought Nokia.
Just after eight, Ryan emerged in jogging pants and a sweatshirt. He walked briskly down the sidewalk, knees high, then crossed into the park and began his morning run. No security detail followed him.
The environment worked to Milo’s advantage. Winter had stripped the concealing foliage of its leaves, and the Heath’s naturally rolling terrain gave him numerous vantage points. While Ryan was in motion, the chance of a drop was unlikely; anything thrown on the ground could easily be intercepted by passersby. It was during the pauses-and despite Ryan’s air of athleticism, there were plenty-that Milo brought the camera to his eye and zoomed in on the man’s hands. Two stops at trees, where he leaned against the trunk and tugged his ankles up high behind himself, and three stops at benches. At the third one, he reached into a pocket in his running pants but only took out a pack of cigarettes, which went back into his pocket. While he smoked, Milo found a better position, then watched him deposit the butt into a trash can. At one point, Ryan ran into a friend, also jogging. They shook hands, the friend still bouncing in his springy shoes, and talked for a couple of minutes. Milo took photographs of the entire encounter.
Ryan returned home by nine thirty. Milo found a trash can, in which he dropped his jacket and tie, and slipped on his sunglasses, so that when Ryan left for church he was a slightly different man.
Ryan reemerged in a charcoal suit, joined by a thin, birdlike wife and his two cleaned and pressed sons. Heath Street was waking up, the stores just opening. While in most of London blue laws kept Sunday shop hours to a minimum, tourist areas like Hampstead were exempt, and the mixed population raised their blinds in preparation for the rush of Sunday shoppers arriving from quieter neighborhoods.
The Ryans paused three times along that walk, and Milo photographed each encounter. The first was with an old woman heading in the same direction. Mrs. Ryan approached her and helped her cross the street. Then, after a moment’s consultation, the whole family remained with the woman, keeping to her shuffling pace. Next, a heavy white-haired man shook Ryan’s hand in both of his, grinning madly, his pink cheeks glowing. Ryan made a joke, which caused the man to erupt in fits of laughter, then patted his shoulder to send him on his way. The third encounter occurred outside a halal butcher’s, when a bald younger man stopped Ryan, shook his hand, and whispered something close to the side of his face. Ryan smiled broadly but didn’t laugh. As they talked, a bearded man in a taqiyah opened the butcher shop’s front door, and both men stopped their conversation to stare at him. Then the bald man left, and the family continued with the old woman past the Hampstead tube station to Church Row, where more Georgian houses led down to the crowd of parishioners entering St. John-at-Hampstead.
Though there were plenty of ideal aspects to passing messages in a church, the Ryans sat, without fail, in the front pew, a location that precluded any secret conversations. The only chances were just before services, or just after, as they greeted their fellow worshippers. From across the street, Milo shot pictures of Ryan’s various handshakes, then headed back to Heath Street until services ended. He took advantage of the opening shops to buy a pair of jeans, a jacket, and some sneakers, which he carried in a bright red shopping bag. As he hurried back to the church, he noticed a Hyundai parked halfway down Church Row, with a man in his fifties sitting behind the wheel. He glanced at the face and kept moving toward the church.
There was something familiar about it, but he couldn’t place it at first. It only came to him as he was taking shots of the parishioners again. The surprise, when it came, nearly made him drop the phone.
He looked up, but the Hyundai was gone. The driver had been one of the two in Berlin, the “Germans” who’d been shadowing him.
The existence of his shadow put a pall over the rest of the day’s surveillance. Had the Germans tracked him to London? Unlikely. More likely, they hadn’t been Germans in the first place, and it only proved that the file on him was more correct than Drummond knew: Milo wasn’t so clever after all.
He felt tense and exhausted by 4:00 P.M., when Ryan returned home for the evening. Still, he’d gotten his photographs, and in a pub, over a tepid plate of steak and kidney pie, he sent them to one of the phone numbers Drummond had given him-an analysis unit that had probably been pieced together from friends in the “war on drugs.”
By then, he had played and replayed his shadow’s face in his head, going over the previous months’ jobs, searching for some connection. Tourism, as Drummond had pointed out, is only as secure as its anonymity. The same is true for Tourists themselves. Their only real safety lies in their lack of identity, and when that disappears the world becomes far more dangerous.
Not just dangerous, but…
He stared at his plate, realizing that his shadow’s existence proved something larger than his own stupidity. He called Drummond. The voice mail answered. He said, “It’s no longer a theory,” then hung up. Within five minutes, his phone was ringing.
“What’s with the elusive messages, Hall? Is he or isn’t he selling secrets?”
“No sign yet. I mean the larger story. It’s not a theory.”
Drummond cleared his throat. “Some explanation, please.”
Milo tried. It was all about his shadow. Berlin, and now London. “Only the department knows my day-to-day location-correct?”
“Correct.”
“Well, if you really don’t have someone shadowing me-you don’t, do you?”
Drummond verified this with a grunt.
“Then someone inside the department is leaking my location, and has been doing so at least since Berlin.”
“Is the guy Chinese?”
“Don’t be simple, Alan. I just don’t see another way to explain it.”
He mused over that, humming. “Well, if you see him again…”
“I know. I will.”
The image analysts texted their reports on Ryan’s acquaintances. None raised any red flags, though one-the old woman the whole family helped to church-was unidentifiable. It was possible that Dzubenko had been mistaken about the day that information was transferred, or that the meeting time had been changed since his defection. Milo needed to be sure, though, so he returned to Hampstead Heath as the sun hung low, preparing to disappear, and rain began to fall. He checked the sodden ground along Ryan’s path and examined the two trees against which he’d stretched, but it was while he was crouched in the wet grass under the second of the three benches that he found it, and finding it surprised him almost as much as the German had.
It was a small USB flash drive, cleverly encased in two inches of wood, stuck with adhesive to the underside of the bench. A casual observer wouldn’t have noticed anything, and in the failing light Milo nearly missed it, too, but he was depending more on his hands than his eyes, and when he caught the edge of the wood he pulled and felt it break off easily into his palm.
He took out his phone, which contained a Company-installed standard USB port. As a light shower began, he copied the contents of the flash drive-three Word documents-then replaced it. He was soaking wet by the time he squatted among high shrubs farther down the incline.
The documents were encoded and unreadable, so Milo sent them to the analysts with a note for Drummond: From subject-no recipient yet. He pocketed the phone and made sure his view of the bench was unobstructed and clear (a lamppost illuminated the area), then checked the time. It was seven o’clock, cold and pouring rain, and he had no idea how long it would take for the drive to be picked up. It would be, he suspected, a very long night.
He was wrong. At a little after eight, a tall, elegant figure crossed the Heath, heading toward the bench. Milo brought the phone to his eye, zooming in. The figure paused by the bench and looked around. Milo lowered the phone and stood. “What the hell are you doing?”
Einner shook his head and walked down to him. “You must be freezing your ass off.”
“Get out of here.”
“Drummond thought you could use some help. You hadn’t moved for nearly an hour-he wanted to find out if you were dead.”
“He could’ve called.”
Einner didn’t answer. They both knew that Drummond just wanted to make sure Milo hadn’t abandoned his phone and walked.
“Did it pan out?” Milo asked.
“I found you, didn’t I?”
“I mean your angle. Did Marko’s story check out?”
“Yeah. And I assume that you sitting in the rain means yours is checking out, too.”
“Just waiting for the pickup.”
Einner grinned, then turned to look at the empty bench up the hill. He pointed at the nearby lamppost. “See that?”
“The lamp?”
“Yeah. Look at the top of it.”
When his eyes adjusted to the glare, he could make out three inconspicuous cameras atop the pole. He exhaled. “I think I see where you’re going with this.”
“Sure you do,” Einner said and took out his phone. After a moment, he said, “Can I get a visual on a surveillance camera? Exactly, baby. Just see where I am and there should be three to choose from. I need a bench.”
As he waited for the reply he shrugged at Milo.
“How’s it coming in? Great. Listen, we’re going to need IDs on anyone who sits there or fools around with it. Particularly the latter.” He covered the mouthpiece and said to Milo, “Underneath?”
“Yeah.”
“You heard it? That’s what we’re looking for. And you’ll be reporting it directly to Hall. You have the number? Thanks, you’re a doll.” Einner hung up and opened his arms. “Come praise your betters.”
Milo patted his pockets and came up with Nicorette, feeling inept next to this tech-savvy young man.
Einner said, “Let’s go find some girls.”
They left the park separately and took the tube back into town. Appearing in public together would have broken any number of Tourism rules, so they settled for an indoor party. Milo picked up a new suit, and, even though Einner had said he would bring “something fun,” Milo bought a bottle of Finlandia vodka and another of some very dry Noilly Prat vermouth. He had just showered and dressed again when there was a knock at his door. Einner swept past him and examined the room, then sniffed the steam in the bathroom.
“Where’s the party favors?” asked Milo.
“Am I not enough?” Einner stripped off his coat, which was dry despite the rain outside-he was probably staying in the same hotel. “You just take care of the drinks, old man.”
“Vodka martini?”
“I’d kill you for one.”
Milo mixed them up in glasses in the bathroom, and when he emerged found Einner by the window, the blinds pulled, leaning over the breakfast table. With a credit card he was cutting up sixteen lines of cocaine.
Einner looked up, squinting. “The nose? Will it work?”
“I’ll give it my best shot.”
They sat across from each other at the table and toasted their survival. Einner made a face after his first sip. “Ouch.”
“More vermouth?”
“An olive might help.”
“They were out.”
Einner took another sip, then handed over a rolled ten-pound note. “Try that on.”
Milo stuck to the one swollen nostril with an open passageway, then passed back the note. He wiped his sore nose unconsciously and drank and watched Einner inhale two lines as if this were his morning routine.
“When was the last time you did blow?”
Milo’s memory seemed to be both slow and quick. “Christ, six years ago? No, seven.”
“Aha! Back when you were the great Charles Alexander.”
They’d had this talk before. Milo said, “He was never as good as people would have you think. It’s a myth, just like the Black Book. It keeps Tourists on their toes.”
They did two more lines. Milo mixed more drinks. As he came out of the bathroom, his phone vibrated for his attention. It was a message from the analysts:
Package picked up. Pavlo Romanenko, third secretary political section, Ukrainian embassy, London.
“My lead checked out.”
“Two for two,” Einner said, then refused Milo’s offer of a Nicorette and nodded at the four remaining lines. “Ready?”
“I should take a break.”
“What you should do is quit wiping your nose.”
He hadn’t realized he was doing it. They both laughed; then Einner settled and said, very seriously, “You really think we’re in trouble?”
“With a mole?” Milo frowned at his glass. “Maybe. It’s looking like it.”
Silence followed. Einner then related the story of two Iranians he’d killed a few months ago in Rome. “Direct from Tehran to make local al Qaeda contacts. Typical setup. One, the nervous moneyman. The other a Revolutionary Guard to do the heavy lifting and keep Moneybags in line. I took out the tough one first-the guy hung around his hotel window too much-then went in for the soft target. It turned out I was wrong. Moneybags was as frothing as his guard. Nearly killed me with his hands,” Einner said, raising his own in a pair of claws. “Before I shot him, he asked if I knew why, in the end, his people would win. No, Mohammed. Tell me. His people, he said, still had belief on their side. We, on the other hand, had nothing.”
“How’d you answer that?” Milo asked, curious despite himself.
“How do you think? I killed him.” Einner finished his drink. “I wasn’t about to lecture him on the Black Book.”
Milo left to refill their drinks in the bathroom, wondering about the point of that story. When he returned, Einner was stretched out on the bed, stomach down, his chin resting on the backs of his hands. He took the martini with thanks.
“So why’d you come back?” Einner asked. “You were out of the Company. Grainger was dead, and you’d spent time in the pokey for his murder. You still came back.”
“Maybe I wanted a last fling with adventure. Some fun.”
That provoked a shake of the head. “No, man. You’re the least happy Tourist we’ve got.”
“Maybe I realized I’m no good at anything else.”
Einner seemed to believe that, then he didn’t. “You’re not that good. Not anymore.”
“To be honest, I don’t know. It was probably a mistake. You heard Drummond. I don’t care what reasons he comes up with, I’ll never regret not killing that girl.”
“She’s dead anyway.”
“Not by my hand.”
Einner sighed loudly. “Sounds like Mohammed was wrong-you, at least, have run head-on into your beliefs.”
Milo felt anxiety slipping through his buzz. “Maybe. But any department that orders a hit like that doesn’t deserve to stay around.”
“You just wander into the spy business yesterday?”
“Come on, James. Even you’ve got limits, right? If you’d been given that assignment-don’t tell me you’d actually do it.”
Einner thought a moment but didn’t answer. He raised himself from the bed, grabbed his martini, and lifted it. “To knowing what to do, and when.” They both drank; then Einner asked, “Did you ever figure it out?”
“Figure what out?”
“Last we talked, I was stewing in my own shit, and you were off to figure out who was assassinating Sudanese mullahs.”
“Yeah. That’s right.”
“It really was Grainger?”
Milo nodded. “But the orders came from Senator Nathan Irwin. He’s the one who ordered Angela killed, then Grainger, once he’d become a liability.”
“Fucking senators,” Einner muttered, and Milo realized that he’d already known all this. Perhaps Drummond had shared. He just wanted to know what Milo knew. Finally, Einner said, “This man must be on your shit list.”
There was no need to answer that.
Einner cleared this throat. “Let’s finish up this stuff.”
They took turns, then wiped the remnants onto their gums. Milo refilled their drinks, but when he came out again there were eight more white lines on the table. Einner was in one of the chairs, wiping his nose. “I’m close to the Book, Milo.”
“It’s Sebastian. And I don’t believe you.”
“Why not? You found a copy of it. In Spain, you said.”
“I was lying, James. There’s no such thing as the Black Book of Tourism.”
Einner rocked his head from side to side, digesting that. “We’ll see. Anyway, I’ve found clues. I think it’s in Bern.”
“What clues?”
“You think I’d tell you? An unbeliever?”
According to the legend that all Tourists learned at one point or another, twenty-one copies of the Black Book of Tourism had been hidden by a retired Tourist in secret spots throughout the world. The myth of Tourism’s Bible fed into each Tourist’s desire for a single guide to show him the path to survival and sanity and perhaps even morality in a profession that encouraged none of these things. Until last August, it had only been a myth.
Milo, driven by some undeniable desire while in prison, had sat down and written it himself. Not long-maybe thirty pages-but it summed up what he thought such a book should say. He’d later copied it out by hand into twenty-one children’s schoolbooks and, over the first month of his return to Tourism, spread them throughout Europe and Russia. Then, over time, he’d slowly left clues to their whereabouts.
So when Einner said that he was closing in on a copy in Bern, Milo could chart the clues that had brought him so far. A name engraved on the rear of a tombstone outside Malmö, Sweden. An address included in the records of that name, of a nonexistent patient in the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire, a Toulouse teaching hospital. On one of the exterior walls of that address in the north of Milan, the hardly visible polyurethane words MARIANS JAZZROOM. Einner was nearly there. Milo wondered, with a tinge of despair, just what he would make of his collected wisdom.
Einner was in the toilet when the knock on the door came. It was 11:00 P.M.
“Get that, will you?” Einner called, as if this were his room. “And don’t ever say I don’t take care of you!”
Through the peephole, Milo saw a wide-angled view of two women with faux-fur coats, short skirts, and tiny purses. They not only dressed the same but looked the same, and when he opened the door he realized they were twins.
With a rough working-class accent, one said, “James ’ere?”
“Be right out!” he called over the flushing toilet. “Make them some drinks, Sebastian!”
Milo invited them in and scooped up his phone. They peered around the room as if they’d never been in a hotel before, which he seriously doubted. One alighted on the lines of cocaine. “My kinda party, innit.”
“I’ll be back with the ice,” Milo said. They were already sitting down at the table, tightening the ten-pound note, when he closed the door behind himself. On his way down the corridor to the stairwell he heard Einner saying, “Where the fuck?”
Milo kept on until he had reached the hotel bar. He was suddenly ill, and for some inexplicable reason kept imagining James Einner with his throat cut. He drank gimlets to wash away the image. When he returned two hours later, the room was empty, but it stank.
The phone woke him at six. “Yeah?”
“Riverrun, past Eve.”
“And Adam’s.”
Drummond cleared his throat. “Looks like it’s verified.”
“Bad news.”
Milo heard papers shuffling through the line-if he was calling from New York, it was 1:00 A.M. there. “You’re going to Warsaw for the next one. It’ll take a little more time.”
“Okay.”
“How’s Einner treating you?”
“We’re old friends. But you knew that, of course.”
“Are you?” he said, then sighed. “Listen, I’ve gotten some word from a friend in Germany.”
“Friend? This have to do with-”
“It has to do with you, Hall. Your ethnic radar might not be so bad. Someone in German intelligence was looking for you, but I’m assured that it’s being taken care of.”
“Why were they looking for me?”
“It doesn’t matter. You should be clear now. If you do see them again, let me know. Got it?”
“Sure. That’s good news.”
“Good?”
“If the Germans are shadowing me, then a Chinese mole is no more likely than it was the day before yesterday.”
“It means we’re still deciding, Hall, which means you’re still vetting.”
He popped aspirin, a multivitamin, and two Nicorette-he’d left the Dexedrine in the hotel trash-then checked out. He tipped the doorman who found him a taxi, and nearly dozed on the ride to the airport, half dreaming of James Einner and his two friends.
Milo hadn’t slept with a woman since October, and that had been a clumsy, desperate attempt with his wife. A part of him wondered if he’d made a mistake sidestepping a night of mindless sex, if only because it carried no investment. Simplicity: just an easy trajectory toward orgasm. Unlike that last attempt in October, it might have been fun.
Fun.
You’re the least happy Tourist we’ve got.
His phone shivered on the M4, and he read the Warsaw instructions.
He was just in time to catch an eight twenty British Airways flight, and when he touched down at Frederic Chopin Airport a little before noon, he was nearly sick with hunger. The official guarding this Schengen entry point gave his Sebastian Hall passport a little more of an examination than he was used to, but in the end it was all the same. “Business or tourism?”
The answer rolled off his tongue without thought.
He picked up a bottle of Coke and a cheese sandwich, which he gobbled down before reaching the Avis rental counter. As he took the long, traffic-jammed road toward town, he drank the Coke too fast and it burned the back of his throat. At least it woke him up.
He’d last been to Warsaw in 2000, during that earlier time when he was known as Charles Alexander. Despite what James Einner and others believed, back then he was more anxiety and suicidal bluster than efficiency and purpose. Back then he took whatever drugs could keep him going-pills, powders, and the occasional syringe. He’d felt as if it were someone else’s body he was abusing.
Then he remembered why he’d come to Warsaw in 2000 and understood why he had walked out of his room the previous night. He felt childishly proud, knowing that Dr. Ray, the marriage counselor, would be impressed by his self-knowledge.
He’d come to buy information from a Lebanese traitor in the Bristol Hotel. The Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon had just ended, and in the inevitable internal shake-up that followed, this man feared for his position. So he was preparing for retirement by selling pieces of his extensive library of secrets to the Americans, the British, and the Israelis.
The purchase had gone smoothly, and at the end of it the door to the suite’s second room burst open and two Polish prostitutes danced in with bottles of champagne. The Lebanese grinned-he’d arranged a party to celebrate their newfound cooperation.
Milo hadn’t resisted, and it had been fun in its peculiar way, but it had been only as pleasurable as it could be for someone so disconnected from himself. Early the next year, though, he learned that, six months after their meeting, the Lebanese traitor had been found on a cannabis farm at the northern end of the Beqaa Valley, his throat cut and his tongue removed. Last night, he realized, that image had been triggered by the women, and he had somehow imagined that if he stayed Einner would end up mutilated.
How do you like that, Dr. Ray?
He came gradually into town, the open fields and sooty buildings slowly replaced by modern, postwar architecture. It was after two by the time he checked into the immense Marriott tower-he had no desire to revisit the Bristol-and while he knew he should immediately begin working on Dzubenko’s Warsaw story, he decided to take the rest of the day off. He had a vodka martini in the hotel’s Panorama bar, then lifted a complimentary Tribune and headed out to CDQ, an arty bar where he could drink in peace to the strains of what the pretty bartender told him was Charlotte Gainsbourg’s latest album, 5:55. Serge Gainsbourg’s daughter was an inspired coincidence, because until last year he’d listened incessantly to the father’s songbook, which had been a sure way to find a better mood. With everything that had gone bad, though, even his musical salvation had been contaminated, and he hadn’t listened to it since. Yet here he was, among the young art crowd of Warsaw, gazing at skinny girls and ugly paintings, listening to the daughter of the man who had once been able to bestow upon him so much joy. He ordered another drink and found a corner with enough light to read the Tribune.
The first article that caught his eye extensively quoted Reuters about the discovery of Adriana Stanescu’s body on a road that led to Marseille. The details, Milo noticed, were sketchy, and the press releases by the Berlin police suggested that Adriana had been captured and killed by human traffickers with Russian connections. He stuck more Nicorette in his mouth and tried to chew away the shakes.
Then, three pages in, he saw a photograph of Senator Nathan Irwin, Republican from Minnesota.
There was nothing truly notable in the senator’s appearance here-he was pictured with a group of other senators looking into the real estate slump that had been causing problems for the last few months-but seeing his smug face did Milo no good. He ordered another martini and considered how much more empty life had become because of this man. Thomas Grainger hadn’t only been his boss and friend; he’d been Stephanie’s godfather, who would sometimes show up at the apartment unexpectedly with gifts and a ruddy smile.
Though theirs had been a long-distance friendship, he’d had a particularly warm connection to Angela Yates. She’d attended his wedding, and their history stretched back to when both of them were young, enthusiastic recruits for the Central Intelligence Agency. She’d even been on hand during that disastrous morning in Venice, when Milo and Tina first met. The day Stephanie was born. September 11, 2001. Angela and Tom had touched so many important moments in his life, and because of Nathan Irwin they were both dead.
In truth, there were only two survivors from last year’s mess-Irwin and Milo himself. They had never met, but each knew the other existed.
Kill the little voices.
It was his mother again, whom he’d only known as an occasional visitor in his childhood. Until he was nine she would visit in the night, fearful of capture as she and her German Marxist comrades spread fear throughout Europe. She came to her son like a ghost, whispering urgent lessons that he was too young to understand and would later seldom follow.
Listen to the Bigger Voice. It’s the only one that will ever be straight with you.
What did the Bigger Voice say now?
It was only later, after he had lost track of his martinis, that he succumbed to that voice and went to look for a Telekomunikacja Polska phone booth. His anger had returned. He had spent too long thinking drunkenly of injustice, and when he shoved in the zloty coins the pad of his thumb hurt. He dialed just as forcefully. It only rang twice before the old man answered with a hesitant, “Da?”
In Russian, Milo said, “You couldn’t stick to our deal, could you?”
“I was wondering when you would call. It’s not like you think. She got away.”
“How hard is it to hold on to a kid?” Milo demanded. “You lose a kid, it’s because you want to lose her.”
“She got away.”
“Bastard. She got away, then you tracked her down and killed her.”
“You’re drunk, Milo.”
“Yes. And you and I are done.”
“Listen to me,” he said. “I did track her down, but she was already dead.”
“Then who killed her?”
“Your people, I’d wager.”
“They don’t know who did it.”
“Is that what they told you?”
Milo considered some replies, but they were all too crude and childish-he didn’t want to be childish with Yevgeny. So he hung up.
He got another drink but was out of Nicorette and had to bum cigarettes off a table of pretty girls with extravagant mascara and matching platinum blond hair. They were talking politics. After an initial wave of curiosity, they soon realized that he was just another drunk American and sent him packing.
“Go to Iraq,” the sexiest one told him, and the others laughed.
He was in bed by eleven, unconscionably drunk, the television on and the spinning room stinking of the cigarettes he’d bought on the way back to the hotel. He briefly flipped to BBC World News, which was full of Fidel Castro’s retirement, and the unanimous election by the Cuban National Assembly of his younger brother, Raúl. The phrase “end of an era” was repeated endlessly. The results of the previous night’s Academy Awards distracted him from those heavier issues.
But they’re all the little voices, his mother said.
After he drifted to sleep briefly his eyelids rose as, on the screen, a tall BBC reporter Milo recognized walked through a park alongside a Chinese man. It was Zhang Yesui, the Chinese ambassador to the UN. Though he moved and spoke with that bland diplomatic nonaggression that to outsiders looks like weakness, his words were pointed. “After learning of the pre-independence discussions between Kosovo and certain current members of the Security Council, it falls on us to suggest that these members should drop their unilateral positions in regard to other nations.”
“I believe you’re talking about the United States,” said the reporter.
“I am. The current policy of intruding on sovereign nations is counterproductive to global peace. We’ve seen it in Iraq and Kosovo and the Sudan.”
“The Sudan?”
Milo blinked, rubbing his eyes.
“It has come to our attention that certain elements within the American government had a hand in last year’s unrest, which killed nearly a hundred innocent civilians. China, along with the United Nations as a whole, considers stability in that region paramount, and it hurts us to find that another member has been undermining our efforts for peace.”
Surprisingly, there was no follow-up question to that accusation, but more surprising was the fact that it had been made at all. Milo watched for a while longer, waiting for some reference to the ambassador’s statement, but it had slipped away, as if it had never been made.
He considered calling Drummond, but Drummond would already be dealing with the fallout. It would be one additional piece of evidence for Marko Dzubenko’s story, and certain politicians-Nathan Irwin, in particular-would be calling him up, demanding answers. For the moment, Milo was grateful he no longer worked in administration.
The worry slipped away as the fatigue caught up to him, and he flipped to a thriller dubbed into Polish and lowered the volume.
He snored so loudly that he sometimes woke himself, and when, a little after three, his door opened quietly and three visitors entered, they exchanged silent smirks over the noise. In the light of the silent television now playing soft-core pornography, they took positions around him.
One grabbed his feet; the other put him in a headlock. As Milo snapped awake they raised him briefly from the bed and slammed him down again. He tried to claw at the one holding his head but was too confused to do a thing. He felt the sharp prick of a needle in his arm.
He continued to struggle, weakening, until his arms first lost energy and then his legs. They were shadows, these men, and behind them the bright television displayed blurred bodies, bare white breasts with smeared pink nipples.
They were wrapping him now, and panic shuddered through him weakly as he imagined plastic, but it was just the bedsheets. He was so tired. He could hardly keep his eyes open. A blur of a man with a bruised eye and what might have been a mustache leaned over him and spoke in heavily accented English. “Don’t worry. We’re not going to kill you yet.”
Milo blinked at him, his vision going fast, his tongue heavy. “You’re German?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Thought so.” He tried to add something else, but his tongue would no longer cooperate.