The Tourist
The Tourist
Olen Steinhauer
Superb new CIA thriller featuring black ops expert Milo Weaver and acclaimed by Lee Child as ‘first class – the kind of thing John le Carre might have written’In the global age of the CIA, wherever there's trouble, there's a Tourist: the men and women who do the dirty work. They're the Company's best agents – and Milo Weaver was the best of them all.Following a near-lethal encounter with foreign hitman the 'Tiger', a burnt-out Milo decides to continue his work from behind a desk. Four years later, he's no closer to finding the Tiger than he was before. When the elusive assassin unexpectedly gives himself up to Milo, it's because he wants something in return: revenge.Once a Tourist, always a Tourist – soon Milo is back in the field, tracking down the Tiger's handler in a world of betrayal, skewed politics and extreme violence. It's a world he knows well but he's about to learn the toughest lesson of all: trust no one.
The TOURIST
OLEN STEINHAUER
Copyright (#u091b7d02-b9dd-575e-8bcc-09ecba9ad902)
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2009
Copyright © Olen Steinhauer 2007
Olen Steinhauer asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication
Source ISBN: 9780007296774
Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2009 ISBN: 9780007310111
Version: 2017-10-18
Dedication (#u091b7d02-b9dd-575e-8bcc-09ecba9ad902)
For
MARGO
Contents
Cover (#u8adac187-1ecd-54e5-a008-5bfd11a28a1b)
Title Page (#ud68e2918-62ae-59e9-94eb-3bdeadd3c643)
Copyright (#u90de6523-3aae-547a-8ede-43fb595c46f7)
Dedication (#ub8bd8866-30ee-5df2-a281-268734b115b0)
The End Of Tourism (#uf82bd398-008f-524e-b307-4178bbd9a977)
Chapter One (#uf12e4425-6515-5c13-935d-abdb7fbdb29a)
Chapter Two (#u43f5e015-4920-50dd-8cd1-4b9da3cc6b64)
Chapter Three (#u3a0857ac-e1ab-545c-a8cf-3d8e9211f2da)
Chapter Four (#u58c0d4ea-92b2-54d1-a1b6-51bb465b91a2)
Chapter Five (#u43abeee7-f92f-5c10-b053-f0fa08db6ca7)
Chapter Six (#u1fcc99c6-7a99-57f4-8c08-8f7b076684d2)
Part One: Problems Of The International Tourist Trade (#uec6d4167-44d1-5ab6-9ffe-32c9962585f0)
Chapter One (#u4833aff5-9219-5a23-9ea1-4d95d46f3cf5)
Chapter Two (#u2b48ec10-c56c-5911-9f3d-5c789d47c435)
Chapter Three (#u1183ce19-ff10-5f5d-801c-8ddc710a88b5)
Chapter Four (#u990b8f02-694b-5af3-abb4-e2b8a02b530d)
Chapter Five (#uc76f2934-b904-5744-8660-ba71869a557a)
Chapter Six (#ubca09e77-603f-534c-8351-972643bcc320)
Chapter Seven (#u4591906c-17c8-546f-be58-78b09a3ca042)
Chapter Eight (#u59715ec3-6177-5577-b28b-2b712c9359fe)
Chapter Nine (#uf87c91fa-2e9d-5b9d-a747-6e73f4f2383d)
Chapter Ten (#ubac1ac41-0d9b-54d5-9ba5-8bcc3b4f4b67)
Chapter Eleven (#u53e8ecd6-8a73-5da7-a3b4-e84f818cc819)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Two: Tourism Is Storytelling (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
The Beginning Of Tourism (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author
Also By Olen Steinhauer (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
(#u091b7d02-b9dd-575e-8bcc-09ecba9ad902)
The END of TOURISM (#u091b7d02-b9dd-575e-8bcc-09ecba9ad902)
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, TO
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2001
1 (#u091b7d02-b9dd-575e-8bcc-09ecba9ad902)
Four hours after his failed suicide attempt, he descended toward Aerodrom Ljubljana. A tone sounded, and above his head the seat belt sign glowed. Beside him, a Swiss businesswoman buckled her belt and gazed out the window at the clear Slovenian sky—all it had taken was one initial rebuff to convince her that the twitching American she’d been seated next to had no interest in conversation.
The American closed his eyes, thinking about the morning’s failure in Amsterdam—gunfire, shattering glass and splintered wood, sirens.
If suicide is sin, he thought, then what is it to someone who doesn’t believe in sin? What is it then? An abomination of nature? Probably, because the one immutable law of nature is to continue existing. Witness: weeds, cockroaches, ants, and pigeons. All of nature’s creatures work to a single, unified purpose: to stay alive. It’s the one indisputable theory of everything.
He’d dwelled on suicide so much over the last months, had examined the act from so many angles, that it had lost its punch. The infinitive clause “to commit suicide” was no more tragic than “to eat breakfast” or “to sit,” and the desire to snuff himself was often as strong as his desire “to sleep.”
Sometimes it was a passive urge—drive recklessly without a seat belt; walk blindly into a busy street—though more frequently these days he was urged to take responsibility for his own death. “The Bigger Voice,” his mother would have called it: There’s the knife; youknow what to do. Open the window and tryto fly. At four thirty that morning, while he lay on top of a woman in Amsterdam, pressing her to the floor as her bedroom window exploded from automatic gunfire, the urge had suggested he stand straight and proud and face the hail of bullets like a man.
He’d spent the whole week in Holland, watching over a sixty-year-old U.S.-supported politician whose comments on immigration had put a contract on her head. The hired assassin, a killer who in certain circles was known only as “the Tiger,” had that morning made a third attempt on her life. Had he succeeded, he would have derailed that day’s Dutch House of Representatives vote on her conservative immigration bill.
How the continued existence of one politician—in this case, a woman who had made a career of catering to the whims of frightened farmers and bitter racists—played into the hands of his own country was unknown to him. “Keeping an empire,” Grainger liked to tell him, “is ten times more difficult than gaining one.”
Rationales, in his trade, didn’t matter. Action was its own reason. But, covered in glass shards, the woman under him screaming over the crackling sound, like a deep fryer, of the window frame splintering, he’d thought, What am I doing here? He even placed a hand flat on the wood-chip-covered carpet and began to push himself up again, to face this assassin head-on. Then, in the midst of all that noise, he heard the happy music of his cell phone. He removed his hand from the floor, saw that it was Grainger calling, and shouted into it, “What?”
“Riverrun, past Eve,” Tom Grainger said.
“And Adam’s.”
Learned Grainger had created go-codes out of the first lines of novels. His own Joycean code told him he was needed someplace new. But nothing was new anymore. The unrelenting roll call of cities and hotel rooms and suspicious faces that had constituted his life for too many years was stupefying in its tedium. Would it never stop?
So he hung up on his boss, told the screaming woman to stay where she was, and climbed to his feet … but didn’t die. The bullets had ceased, replaced by the whining sirens of Amsterdam’s finest.
“Slovenia,” Grainger told him later, as he drove the politician safely to the Tweede Kamer. “Portorož, on the coast. We’ve got a vanished suitcase of taxpayer money and a missing station chief. Frank Dawdle.”
“I need a break, Tom.”
“It’ll be like a vacation. Angela Yates is your contact—she works out of Dawdle’s office. A familiar face. Afterward, stay around and enjoy the water.”
As Grainger droned on, outlining the job with minimal details, his stomach had started to hurt, as it still did now, a sharp pain.
If the one immutable law of existence is to exist, then does that make the opposite some sort of crime?
No. Suicide-as-crime would require that nature recognize good and evil. Nature only recognizes balance and imbalance.
Maybe that was the crucial point—balance. He’d slipped to some secluded corner of the extremes, some far reach of utter imbalance. He was a ludicrously unbalanced creature. How could nature smile upon him? Nature, surely, wanted him dead, too.
“Sir?” said a bleached, smiling stewardess. “Your seat belt.”
He blinked at her, confused. “What about it?”
“You need to wear it. We’re landing. It’s for your safety.”
Though he wanted to laugh, he buckled it just for her. Then he reached into his jacket pocket, took out a small white envelope full of pills he’d bought in Düsseldorf, and popped two Dexedrine. To live or die was one issue; for the moment, he just wanted to stay alert.
Suspiciously, the Swiss businesswoman watched him put away his drugs.
The pretty, round-faced brunette behind the scratched bulletproof window watched him approach. He imagined he knew what she noticed—how big his hands were, for example. Piano-player hands. The Dexedrine was making them tremble, just slightly, and if she noticed it she might wonder if he was unconsciously playing a sonata.
He handed over a mangled American passport that had crossed more borders than many diplomats. A touring pianist, she might think. A little pale, damp from the long flight he’d just finished. Bloodshot eyes. Aviatophobia—fear of flying—was probably her suspicion.
He managed a smile, which helped wash away her expression of bureaucratic boredom. She really was very pretty, and he wanted her to know, by his expression, that her face was a nice Slovenian welcome.
The passport gave her his particulars: five foot eleven. Born June 1970—thirty-one years old. Piano player? No—American passports don’t list occupations. She peered up at him and spoke in her unsure accent: “Mr. Charles Alexander?”
He caught himself looking around again, paranoid, and gave another smile. “That’s right.”
“You are here for the business or the tourism?”
“I’m a tourist.”
She held the open passport under a black light, then raised a stamp over one of the few blank pages. “How long will you be in Slovenia?”
Mr. Charles Alexander’s green eyes settled pleasantly on her. “Four days.”
“For vacation? You should spend at least a week. There is many things to see.”
His smile flashed again, and he rocked his head. “Well, maybe you’re right. I’ll see how it goes.”
Satisfied, the clerk pressed the stamp onto the page and handed it back. “Enjoy Slovenia.”
He passed through the luggage area, where other passengers from the Amsterdam-Ljubljana flight leaned on empty carts around the still-barren carousel. None seemed to notice him, so he tried to stop looking like a paranoid drug mule. It was his stomach, he knew, and that initial Dexedrine rush. Two white customs desks sat empty of officials, and he continued through a pair of mirrored doors that opened automatically for him. A crowd of expectant faces sank when they realized he didn’t belong to them. He loosened his tie.
The last time Charles Alexander had been in Slovenia, years ago, he’d been called something else, a name just as false as the one he used now. Back then, the country was still exhilarated by the 1991 ten-day war that had freed it from the Yugoslav Federation. Nestled against Austria, Slovenia had always been the odd man out in that patchwork nation, more German than Balkan. The rest of Yugoslavia accused Slovenes—not without reason—of snobbery.
Still inside the airport, he spotted Angela Yates just outside the doors to the busy arrivals curb. Above business slacks, she wore a blue Viennese blazer, arms crossed over her breasts as she smoked and stared through the gray morning light at the field of parked cars in front of the airport. He didn’t approach her. Instead, he found a bathroom and checked himself in the mirror. The paleness and sweat had nothing to do with aviatophobia. He ripped off his tie, splashed water on his cheeks, wiped at the pink edges of his eyes and blinked, but still looked the same.
“Sorry to get you up,” he said once he’d gotten outside.
Angela jerked, a look of terror passing through her lavender eyes. Then she grinned. She looked tired, but she would be. She’d driven four hours to meet his flight, which meant she’d had to leave Vienna by 5:00 a.m. She tossed the unfinished smoke, a Davidoff, then punched his shoulder and hugged him. The smell of tobacco was comforting. She held him at arm’s length. “You haven’t been eating.”
“Overrated.”
“And you look like hell.”
He shrugged as she yawned into the back of her hand.
“You going to make it?” he asked.
“No sleep last night.”
“Need something?”
Angela got rid of the smile. “Still gulping amphetamines?”
“Only for emergencies,” he lied, because he’d taken that last dose for no other reason than he’d wanted it, and now, as the tremors shook through his bloodstream, he had an urge to empty the rest down his throat. “Want one?”
“Please.”
They crossed an access road choked with morning taxis and buses heading into town, then followed concrete steps down to the parking lot. She whispered, “Is it Charles these days?”
“Almost two years now.”
“Well, it’s a stupid name. Too aristocratic. I refuse to use it.”
“I keep asking for a new one. A month ago I showed up in Nice, and some Russian had already heard about Charles Alexander.”
“Oh?”
“Nearly killed me, that Russian.”
She smiled as if he’d been joking, but he hadn’t been. Then his snapping synapses worried he was sharing too much. Angela knew nothing about his job; she wasn’t supposed to.
“Tell me about Dawdle. How long have you worked with him?”
“Three years.” She took out her key ring and pressed a little black button until she spotted, three rows away, a gray Peugeot winking at them. “Frank’s my boss, but we keep it casual. Just a small Company presence at the embassy.” She paused. “He was sweet on me for a while. Can you imagine? Couldn’t see what was right in front of him.”
She spoke with a tinge of hysteria that made him fear she would cry. He pushed anyway. “What do you think? Could he have done it?”
Angela popped the Peugeot’s trunk. “Absolutely not. Frank Dawdle wasn’t dishonest. Bit of a coward, maybe. A bad dresser. But never dishonest. He didn’t take the money.”
Charles threw in his bag. “You’re using the past tense, Angela.”
“I’m just afraid.”
“Of what?”
Angela knitted her brows, irritated. “That he’s dead. What do you think?”
2 (#u091b7d02-b9dd-575e-8bcc-09ecba9ad902)
She was a careful driver these days, which he supposed was an inevitable result of her two Austrian years. Had she been stationed in Italy, or even here in Slovenia, she would’ve ignored her turn signals and those pesky speed limit notices.
To ease the tension, he brought up old London friends from when they both worked out of that embassy as vaguely titled “attachés.” He’d left in a hurry, and all Angela knew was that his new job, with some undisclosed Company department, required a steady change of names, and that he once again worked under their old boss, Tom Grainger. The rest of London station believed what they’d been told—that he had been fired. She said, “I fly up for parties now and then. They always invite me. But they’re sad, you know? All diplomatic people. There’s something intensely pitiful about them.”
“Really?” he said, though he knew what she meant.
“Like they’re living in their own little compound, surrounded by barbed wire. They pretend they’re keeping everyone out, when in fact they’re locked in.”
It was a nice way to put it, and it made him think of Tom Grainger’s delusions of empire—Roman outposts in hostile lands.
Once they hit the A1 heading southwest, Angela got back to business. “Tom fill you in on everything?”
“Not much. Can I get one of those smokes?”
“Not in the car.”
“Oh.”
“Tell me what you know, and I’ll fill in the rest.”
Thick forests passed them, pines flickering by as he outlined his brief conversation with Grainger. “He says your Frank Dawdle was sent down here to deliver a briefcase full of money. He didn’t say how much.”
“Three million.”
“Dollars?”
She nodded at the road.
Charles continued: “He was last seen at the Hotel Metropol in Portorož by Slovenian intelligence. In his room. Then he disappeared.” He waited for her to fill the numerous blank spots in that story line. All she did was drive in her steady, safe way. “Want to tell me more? Like, who the money was for?”
Angela tilted her head from side to side, but instead of answering she turned on the radio. It was preset to a station she’d found during her long drive from Vienna. Slovenian pop. Terrible stuff.
“And maybe you can tell me why we had to learn his last whereabouts from the SOVA, and not from our own people.”
As if he’d said nothing, she cranked the volume, and boy-band harmonies filled the car. Finally, she started to speak, and Charles had to lean close, over the stick shift, to hear.
“I’m not sure who the orders started with, but they reached us through New York. Tom’s office. He chose Frank for obvious reasons. Old-timer with a spotless record. No signs of ambition. No drinking problems, nothing to be compromised. He was someone they could trust with three million. More importantly, he’s familiar here. If the Slovenes saw him floating around the resort, there’d be no suspicions. He vacations in Portorož every summer, speaks fluent Slovene.” She grunted a half-laugh. “He even stopped to chat with them. Did Tom tell you that? The day he arrived, he saw a SOVA agent in a gift shop and bought him a little toy sailboat. Frank’s like that.”
“I like his style.”
Angela’s look suggested he was being inappropriately ironic. “It was supposed to be simple as pie. Frank takes the money down to the harbor on Saturday—two days ago—and does a straight phrase-code pass-off. Just hands over the briefcase. In return, he gets an address. He goes to a pay phone, calls me in Vienna, and reads off the address. Then he drives back home.”
The song ended, and a young DJ shouted in Slovenian about the hot-hot-hot band he’d just played as he mixed in the intro to the next tune, a sugar-sweet ballad.
“Why wasn’t someone backing him up?”
“Someone was,” she said, spying the rearview. “Leo Bernard. You met him in Munich, remember? Couple of years ago.”
Charles remembered a hulk of a man from Pennsylvania. In Munich, Leo had been their tough-guy backup during an operation with the German BND against an Egyptian heroin racket. They’d never had to put Leo’s fighting skills to the test, but it had given Charles a measure of comfort knowing the big man was available. “Yeah. Leo was funny.”
“Well, he’s dead,” said Angela, again glancing into the rearview. “In his hotel room, a floor above Frank’s. Nine millimeter.” She swallowed. “From his own gun, we think, though we can’t find the weapon itself.”
“Anyone hear it?”
She shook her head. “Leo had a suppressor.”
Charles leaned back into his seat, involuntarily checking the side mirror. He lowered the volume as a woman tried with limited success to carry a high E-note. Then he cut it off. Angela was being cagey about the central facts of this case—the why of all that money—but that could wait. Right now he wanted to visualize the events. “When did they arrive at the coast?”
“Friday afternoon. The seventh.”
“Legends?”
“Frank, no. He was too well known for that. Leo used an old one, Benjamin Schneider, Austrian.”
“Next day, Saturday, was the trade. Which part of the docks?”
“I’ve got it written down.”
“Time?”
“Evening. Seven.”
“Frank disappears …?”
“Last seen at 4:00 A.M. Saturday morning. He was up until then drinking with Bogdan Krizan, the local SOVA head. They’re old friends. Then, around two in the afternoon, the hotel cleaning staff found Leo’s body.”
“What about the dock? Anyone see what happened at seven?”
Again, she glanced into the rearview. “We were too late. The Slovenes weren’t going to ask us why Frank was buying them toys. And we didn’t know about Leo’s body until after seven. His papers were good enough to confuse the Austrian embassy for over eight hours.”
“For three million dollars you couldn’t have sent a couple more watchers?”
Angela tightened her jaw. “Maybe, but hindsight doesn’t do us any good now.”
The incompetence surprised Charles; then again, it didn’t. “Whose call was it?”
When she looked in the mirror yet again, her jaw was tighter, her cheeks flushed. So it was her fault, he thought, but she said, “Frank wanted me to stay in Vienna.”
“It was Frank Dawdle’s idea to go off with three million dollars and only one watcher?”
“I know the man. You don’t.”
She’d said those words without moving her lips. Charles felt the urge to tell her that he did know her boss. He’d worked with him once, in 1996, to get rid of a retired communist spy from some nondescript Eastern European country. But she wasn’t supposed to know about that. He touched her shoulder to show a little sympathy. “I won’t talk to Tom until we’ve got some real answers. Okay?”
She finally looked at him with a weary smile. “Thanks, Milo.”
“It’s Charles.”
The smile turned sardonic. “I wonder if you even have a real name.”
3 (#u091b7d02-b9dd-575e-8bcc-09ecba9ad902)
Their hour-long drive skirted the Italian border, and as they neared the coast the highway opened up and the foliage thinned. The warm morning sun glinted off the road as they passed Koper and Izola, and Charles watched the low shrubs, the Mediterranean architecture, and the ZIMMER-FREI signs that littered each turnoff. It reminded him just how beautiful this tiny stretch of coast truly was. Less than thirty miles that had been pulled back and forth between Italians, Yugoslavs, and Slovenes over centuries of regional warfare.
To their right, they caught occasional glimpses of the Adriatic, and through the open window he smelled salt. He wondered if his own salvation lay in something like this. Disappear, and spend the rest of his years under a hot sun on the sea. The kind of climate that dries and burns the imbalance out of you. But he pushed that aside, because he already knew the truth: Geography solves nothing.
He said, “We can’t do this unless you tell me the rest.”
“What rest?” She spoke as if she had no idea.
“The why. Why Frank Dawdle was sent down here with three million dollars.”
To the rearview, she said, “War criminal. Bosnian Serb. Big fish.”
A small pink hotel passed, and then Portorož Bay opened up, full of sun and glimmering water. “Which one?”
“Does it really matter?”
He supposed it didn’t. Karadžić, Mladić, or any other wanted ić—the story was always the same. They, as well as the Croat zealots on the other side of the battle lines, had all had a hand in the Bosnian genocides that had helped turn a once-adored multiethnic country into an international pariah. Since 1996, these men had been fugitives, hidden by sympathizers and corrupt officials, faced with charges from the UN’s International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. Crimes against humanity, crimes against life and health, genocide, breaches of the Geneva conventions, murder, plunder, and violations of the laws and customs of war. Charles gazed at the Adriatic, sniffing the wind. “The UN’s offering five million for these people.”
“Oh, this guy wanted five,” Angela said as she slowed behind a line of cars with Slovenian, German, and Italian plates. “But all he had was an address, and he demanded the money up front so he could disappear. The UN didn’t trust him, turned him down flat, so some smart young man at Langley decided we should purchase it ourselves for three. A PR coup. We buy ourselves the glory of an arrest and once again point out the UN’s incompetence.” She shrugged. “Five or three—either way, you’re a millionaire.”
“What do we know about him?”
“He wouldn’t tell us anything, but Langley figured it out. Dušan Masković, a Sarajevo Serb who joined the militias in the early days. He’s part of the entourage that’s been hiding the big ones in the Republika Srpska hills. Two weeks ago, he left their employ and contacted the UN Human Rights office in Sarajevo. Apparently, they get people like him every day. So little Dušan put in a call to our embassy in Vienna and found a sympathetic ear.”
“Why not just take care of it there? In Sarajevo?”
The traffic moved steadily forward, and they passed shops with flowers and international newspapers. “He didn’t want to collect in Bosnia. Didn’t even want it set up through the Sarajevo embassy. And he didn’t want anyone stationed in the ex-Yugoslav republics involved.”
“He’s no fool.”
“From what we figure, he got hold of a boat in Croatia and was going to wait in the Adriatic until 7:00 P.M. on Saturday. Then he could slip in, make the trade, and slip out again before he’d have to register with the harbormaster.”
“I see,” Charles said, because despite his returning stomach cramps he finally had enough information to picture the various players and the ways they connected.
“Want me to take care of the room?”
“Let’s check the dock first.”
Portorož’s main harbor lay at the midpoint of the bay; behind it sat the sixties architecture of the Hotel Slovenia, its name written in light blue against white concrete, a surf motif. They parked off the main road and wandered around shops selling model sailboats and T-shirts with PORTOROž and I LOVE SLOVENIA and MY PARENTS WENT TO SLOVENIA AND ALL I GOT … scribbled across them. Sandaled families sucking ice cream cones and cigarettes wandered leisurely past. Behind the shops lay a row of small piers full of vacation boats.
“Which one?” asked Charles.
“Forty-seven.”
He led the way, hands in his pockets, as if he and his lady-friend were enjoying the view and the hot sun. The crews and captains on the motor-and sailboats paid them no attention. It was nearly noon, time for siestas and drink. Germans and Slovenes dozed on their hot decks, and the only voices they heard were from children who couldn’t fall asleep.
Forty-seven was empty, but at forty-nine a humble yacht with an Italian flag was tied up. On its deck, a heavy woman was trying to peel a sausage.
“Buon giorno!” said Charles.
The woman inclined her head politely.
Charles’s Italian was only passable, so he asked Angela to find out when the woman had arrived in Portorož. Angela launched into a machine-gun Roman-Italian that sounded like a blast of insults, but the sausage woman smiled and waved her hands as she threw the insults back. It ended with Angela waving a “Grazie mille.”
Charles waved, too, then leaned close to Angela as they walked away. “Well?”
“She got here Saturday night. There was a motorboat beside theirs—dirty, she tells me—but it left soon after they arrived. She guesses around seven thirty, eight.”
After a couple more steps, Angela realized Charles had stopped somewhere behind her. His hands were on his hips as he stared at the empty spot with a small placard marked “47.” “How clean do you think that water is?”
“I’ve seen worse.”
Charles handed over his jacket, then unbuttoned his shirt as he kicked off his shoes.
“You’re not,” said Angela.
“If the trade happened at all, then it probably didn’t go well. If it led to a fight, something might have dropped in here.”
“Or,” said Angela, “if Dušan’s smart, he took Frank’s body out into the Adriatic and dropped him overboard.”
Charles wanted to tell her that he’d already ruled Dušan Masković out as a murderer—there was nothing for Dušan to gain by killing a man who was going to give him money for a simple address with no questions asked—but changed his mind. He didn’t have time for a fight.
He stripped to his boxers, hiding the pangs in his stomach as he bent to pull off the slacks. He wore no undershirt, and his chest was pale from a week spent under Amsterdam’s gray skies. “If I don’t come up …”
“Don’t look at me,” said Angela. “I can’t swim.”
“Then get Signora Sausage to come for me.”
Before she could think of a reply, Charles had jumped feet-first into the shallow bay. It was a shock to his drug-bubbly nerves, and there was an instant when he almost breathed in; he had to force himself not to. He paddled back to the surface and wiped his face. Angela, on the edge of the pier, smiled down at him. “Done already?”
“Don’t wrinkle my shirt.” He submerged again, then opened his eyes.
With the sun almost directly above, the shadows beneath the water were stark. He saw the dirty white hulls of boats, then the blackness where their undersides curved into darkness. He ran his hands along the Italian boat at number forty-nine, following its lines toward the bow, where a thick cord ran up to the piles, holding the boat secure. He let go of the line and sank into the heavy darkness under the pier, using hands for sight. He touched living things— a rough shell, slime, the scales of a paddling fish—but as he prepared to return to the surface, he found something else. A heavy work boot, hard-soled. It was attached to a foot, jeans, a body. Again, he fought to keep himself from inhaling. He tugged, but the stiff, cold corpse was hard to move.
He came up for air, ignored Angela’s taunts, then submerged again. He used the pilings for leverage. Once he’d dragged the body into the partial light around the Italian boat, through the cloud of kicked sand, he saw why it had been such a struggle. The bloated body—a dark-bearded man—was rope-bound at the waist to a length of heavy metal tubing: a piece of an engine, he guessed.
He broke the surface gasping. This water, which had seemed so clean a minute before, was now filthy. He spat out leakage, wiping his lips with the back of his hand. Above him, hands on her knees, Angela said, “I can hold my breath longer than that. Watch.”
“Help me up.”
She set his clothes in a pile, kneeled on the pier, and reached down to him. Soon he was over the edge, sitting with his knees up, dripping. A breeze set him shivering.
“Well?” said Angela.
“What does Frank look like?”
She reached into her blazer and tugged out a small photograph she’d brought to show to strangers. A frontal portrait, morose but efficiently lit, so that all Frank Dawdle’s features were visible. A clean-shaven man, bald on top, white hair over the ears, sixty or so.
“He didn’t grow a beard since this, did he?”
Angela shook her head, then looked worried. “But the last known photo of Masković …”
He got to his feet. “Unless the Portorož murder rate has gone wild, that’s your Serb down there.”
“I don’t—”
Charles cut her off before she could argue: “We’ll talk with the SOVA, but you need to call Vienna. Now. Check Frank’s office. See what’s missing. Find out what was on his computer before he left.”
He slipped into his shirt, his wet body bleeding the white cotton gray. Angela started fooling with her phone, but her fingers had trouble with the buttons. Charles took her hands in his and looked into her eyes.
“This is serious. Okay? But don’t freak out until we know everything. And let’s not tell the Slovenes about the body. We don’t want them holding us for questioning.”
Again, she nodded.
Charles let go of her and grabbed his jacket, pants, and shoes, then began walking back up the pier, toward the shore. From her boat, her chubby knees to her chin, the Italian woman let out a low whistle. “Bello,” she said.
4 (#u091b7d02-b9dd-575e-8bcc-09ecba9ad902)
An hour and a half later, they were preparing to leave again. Charles wanted to drive, but Angela put up a fight. It was the shock—without him having to say a word, she’d put it together herself. Frank Dawdle, her beloved boss, had killed Leo Bernard, killed Dušan Masković, and walked off with three million dollars of the U.S. government’s money.
The most damning piece of evidence came from her call to Vienna. The hard drive of Dawdle’s computer was missing. Based on power usage, the in-house computer expert believed it had been removed sometime Friday morning, just before Frank and Leo departed for Slovenia.
Despite this, she clung to a new, hopeful theory: The Slovenes were responsible. Frank might have taken his hard drive, but he would only have done so under coercion. His old SOVA buddies were threatening him. When they met with Bogdan Krizan, the local SOVA head, she glared across the Hotel Slovenia table while the old man gobbled a plate of fried calamari and explained that he’d spent Friday night with Frank Dawdle, drinking in his room.
“What do you mean—you visited him?” she said. “Didn’t you have work to do?”
Krizan paused over his food, holding his fork loosely. He had an angular face that seemed to expand when he shrugged in his exaggerated Balkan manner. “We’re old friends, Miss Yates. Old spies. Drinking together until the early morning is what we do. Besides, I’d heard about Charlotte. I offered sympathy in a bottle.”
“Charlotte?” asked Charles.
“His wife,” Krizan said, then corrected: “Ex-wife.”
Angela nodded. “She left him about six months ago. He took it pretty hard.”
“Tragic,” said Krizan.
To Charles, the picture was nearly complete. “What did he tell you about his visit here?”
“Nothing. I asked, of course, many times. But he’d only wink at me. Now, I’m beginning to wish he’d trusted me.”
“Me, too.”
“Is he in trouble?” Krizan said this without any visible worry.
Charles shook his head. Angela’s cell phone rang, and she left the table.
“There’s a bitter woman,” said Krizan, nodding at her backside. “You know what Frank calls her?”
Charles didn’t.
“My blue-eyed wonder.” He grinned. “Lovely man, but he wouldn’t know a lesbian if she punched him in the nose.”
Charles leaned closer as Krizan dug into his calamari. “You can’t think of anything else?”
“It’s hard when you won’t tell me what this is about,” he said, then chewed. “But no. He seemed very normal to me.”
Near the door, Angela pressed a palm against one ear so she could better hear the caller. Charles got up and shook Krizan’s hand. “Thanks for your help.”
“If Frank is in trouble,” said Krizan, holding on to him a moment longer than was polite, “then I hope you’ll be fair with him. He’s put in a lot of good years for your country. If he’s slipped up in the autumn of his life, then who’s to blame him?” That exaggerated shrug returned, and he let Charles go. “We can’t keep to perfection one hundred percent of the time. None of us are God.”
Charles left Krizan to his philosophizing and reached Angela as she hung up, her face red.
“What is it?”
“That was Max.”
“Who?”
“He’s the embassy night clerk. In Vienna. On Thursday night, one of Frank’s informers sent in information about a Russian we’re watching. Big oligarch. Roman Ugrimov.”
Charles knew about Ugrimov—a businessman who’d left Russia to save his skin, but kept influential contacts there as he spread his diversified portfolio around the world. “What kind of information?”
“The blackmail kind.” She paused. “He’s a pedophile.”
“Might be a coincidence,” Charles said as they left the restaurant, entering the long socialist-mauve lobby, where three SOVA agents stood around, watching out for their boss.
“Maybe. But yesterday Ugrimov moved into his new house. In Venice.”
Again, Charles stopped, and Angela had to walk back to him. Staring at the bright lobby windows, the final pieces fitted together. He said, “That’s just across the water. With a boat, it’s ideal.”
“I suppose, but—”
“What does someone with three million dollars in stolen money need most?” Charles cut in. “He needs a new name. A man with Roman Ugrimov’s connections could easily supply papers. If persuaded.”
She didn’t answer, only stared at him.
“One more call,” he said. “Get someone to check with the harbormasters in Venice. Find out if any boats were abandoned in the last two days.”
They waited for the callback in a central café that had yet to adjust to the postcommunist foreigners who now shared their thirty-mile coastline. Behind the zinc counter a heavy matron in a coffee-and-beer-splattered apron served Laško Pivo on tap to underpaid dockworkers. The woman seemed annoyed by Angela’s request for a cappuccino, and when it arrived it turned out to be a too-sweet instant mix. Charles convinced her to just drink it, then asked why she hadn’t told him that Frank’s wife had walked out on him.
She took another sip and made a face. “Lots of people get divorced.”
“It’s one of the most stressful things there is,” he said. “Divorces change people. Often, they get an urge to start again at zero and redo their lives, but better.” He rubbed his nose. “Maybe Frank decided he should’ve been working for the other side all along.”
“There is no other side anymore.”
“Sure there is. Himself.”
She didn’t seem convinced of anything yet. Her phone rang, and as she listened she shook her head in anger—at Frank, at Charles, at herself. Rome station told her that on Sunday morning a boat with Dubrovnik registration tags had been found floating just beyond the Lido’s docks. “They say there’s blood inside,” the station chief explained.
After she’d hung up, Charles offered to drive—he didn’t want her Austrian habits slowing them down. In reply, Angela showed him her stiff middle finger.
He won out in the end, though, because once they were among the tangled hills of the upper peninsula, she started to cry. He got her to pull over, and they switched seats. Near the Italian border, she tried to explain away her hysterical behavior.
“It’s hard. You work years teaching yourself to trust a few people. Not many, but just enough to get by. And once you do trust them, there’s no going back. There can’t be. Because how else can you do your job?”
Charles let that sit without replying, but wondered if this was his own problem. The idea of trusting anyone besides the man who called him with assignments had long ago been proven untenable. Maybe the human body just couldn’t take that level of suspicion.
After showing their passports and crossing into Italy, he took out his cell phone and dialed. He talked a moment to Grainger and repeated back the information he’d received: “Scuola Vecchia della Misericordia. Third door.”
“What was that?” Angela asked when he hung up.
He dialed a second number. After a few rings, Bogdan Krizan warily said, “Da?”
“Go to the docks across from the Hotel Slovenia. Number forty-seven. In the water you’ll find a Bosnian Serb named Dušan Masković. You’ve got that?”
Krizan breathed heavily. “This is about Frank?”
Charles hung up.
5 (#u091b7d02-b9dd-575e-8bcc-09ecba9ad902)
It took three hours to reach Venice and hire a water-taxi—a motoscafo. By five thirty they were at the Lido docks. A sulking young Carabiniere with a wishful mustache was waiting by the abandoned motorboat—the Venetians had been told to expect visitors, but to not set up a welcome party. He raised the red police tape for them, but didn’t follow them aboard. It was all there—the Dubrovnik registration papers, the filthy cabin littered with spare engine parts, and, in one corner, a brown splash of sun-dried blood.
They didn’t spend long on it. The only things Frank Dawdle had left in that boat were his fingerprints and the chronology of the killing. Standing in the middle of the cabin, Charles held out two fingers in an imitation pistol. “Shoots him here, then drags him out.” He squatted to indicate where the oil on the floor had been smeared, with faint traces of blood. “Maybe he tied that metal tubing to him on the boat, or maybe in the water. It doesn’t matter.”
“No,” said Angela, eyeing him. “It doesn’t.”
They found no shell casings. It was possible the casings had fallen into Portorož Bay, but it was also possible that Frank had followed Company procedure and collected them, even though he’d left his prints. Panic, maybe, but that, too, didn’t matter.
They thanked the Carabiniere, who muttered “Prego” while staring at Angela’s breasts, then found the motoscafo driver waiting on the dock with an unlit cigarette between his lips. Behind him, the sun was low. He informed them that the meter was still running, and it had passed 150,000 lire. He seemed very pleased when neither passenger made a fuss.
It took another twenty minutes to ride back up the Grand Canal, the bumpy path taking them up to the Cannaregio district, where the Russian businessman, Roman Ugrimov, had just moved in. “He’s into everything,” Angela explained. “Russian utilities, Austrian land development—even a South African gold mine.”
He squinted in the hot breeze at a passing vaporetto full of tourists. “Moved to Vienna two years ago, didn’t he?”
“That’s when we started investigating. Lots of dirt, but nothing sticks.”
“Ugrimov’s security is tight?”
“Unbelievable. Frank wanted evidence of his pedophilia. He travels with a thirteen-year-old niece. But she’s no niece. We’re sure of that.”
“How do you get dirt on him?”
Angela gripped the edge of the rocking boat to keep balanced. “Frank found a source. He really is quite good at his job.”
“That’s what worries me.”
He paid the driver once they’d reached the vaporetto stop at Ca’ d’Oro, tipping him handsomely, and they broke through crowds of milling tourists to reach the maze of empty backstreets. Finally, after some guesswork, they found the open area—not quite a square—of Rio Terrá Barba Fruttariol.
Roman Ugrimov’s palazzo was a dilapidated but ornate corner building that rose up high. It opened onto Barba Fruttariol, but the long, covered terrace that Angela gazed at, shielding her eyes with a hand, wrapped around to a side street. “Impressive,” she said.
“A lot of ex-KGB live in impressive houses.”
“KGB?” She stared at him. “You already know about this guy. How?”
Charles touched the envelope of Dexedrine in his pocket for comfort. “I hear things.”
“Oh. I don’t have clearance.”
Charles didn’t bother answering.
“You want to run this, then?”
“I’d rather you did. I don’t carry a Company ID.”
“Curiouser and curiouser,” Angela said as she rang the front bell.
She showed her State Department ID to a bald, cliché-ridden bodyguard with a wired earplug and asked to speak with Roman Ugrimov. The large man spoke Russian into his lapel, listened to an answer, then walked them up a dim, steep stairwell of worn stone. At the top, he unlocked a heavy wooden door.
Ugrimov’s apartment seemed to have been flown in direct from Manhattan: shimmering wood floors, modern designer furniture, plasma television, and double-paned sliding doors leading to a long terrace that overlooked an evening panorama of Venetian rooftops to the Grand Canal. Even Charles had to admit it was breathtaking.
Ugrimov himself was seated at a steel table in a high-backed chair, reading from a notebook computer. He smiled at them, feigning surprise, and got up with an outstretched hand. “The first visitors to my new home,” he said in easy English. “Welcome.”
He was tall, fiftyish, with wavy gray hair and a bright smile. Despite heavy eyes that matched Charles’s, he had a youthful vitality about him.
After the introductions, he led them to the overdesigned sofas. “Now, please. Tell me what I can do for my American friends.”
Angela handed over her photograph of Frank Dawdle. Ugrimov slipped on some wide Ralph Lauren bifocals and tilted it in the failing evening light. “Who’s this supposed to be?”
“He works for the American government,” said Angela.
“CIA, too?”
“We’re just embassy staff. He’s been missing three days.”
“Oh.” Ugrimov handed back the photo. “That must be troubling.”
“It is,” Angela said. “You’re sure he hasn’t come to see you?”
“Nikolai,” said Ugrimov, and in Russian asked, “Have we had any visitors?”
The bodyguard rolled out his lower lip and shook his head.
Ugrimov shrugged. “Nothing, I’m afraid. Perhaps you can tell me why you think he would come here. I don’t know this man, do I?”
Charles said, “He was looking into your life just before he disappeared.”
“Oh,” the Russian said again. He raised a finger. “You’re telling me that someone at the American embassy in Vienna has been looking into my life and works?”
“You’d be insulted if they didn’t,” said Charles.
Ugrimov grinned. “Okay. Let me offer some drinks. Or are you on the job?”
To Charles’s annoyance, Angela said, “We’re on the job,” and stood. She handed over a business card. “If Mr. Dawdle does get in contact with you, then please call me.”
“I’ll be sure to do that.” He turned to Charles. “Do svidaniya.”
Charles repeated the Russian farewell back to him.
Once they were down the steps and in the dark street, the air moist and still warm, Angela yawned again and said, “What was that?”
“What?”
“How’d he know you spoke Russian?”
“I’m telling you, I need a new name.” Charles looked up the length of the street. “The Russian community’s not so big.”
“Not so small either,” said Angela. “What’re you looking for?”
“There.” He didn’t point, only nodded at a small sign at the corner indicating an osteria. “Let’s take a long walk around to there. Eat and watch.”
“You don’t trust him?”
“A man like that—he’d never admit it if Dawdle came to him.”
“Watch if you want. I need some sleep.”
“How about a pill?”
“First one’s free?” she said, then winked and stifled another yawn. “I have embassy drug tests to contend with.”
“Then at least leave me one of your cigarettes.”
“When did you start smoking?”
“I’m in the midst of quitting.”
She tapped one out for him, but before handing it over said, “Is it the drugs that do it to you? Or the job?”
“Do what?”
“Maybe it’s all the names.” She handed over the cigarette. “Maybe that’s what’s made you so cold. When you were Milo, you were a different person.”
He blinked at her, thinking, but no reply came to him.
6 (#u091b7d02-b9dd-575e-8bcc-09ecba9ad902)
He spent the first part of his night watch at the little osteria, looking down Barba Fruttariol, eating a dinner of cicchetti—small portions of seafood and grilled vegetables—and washing it down with a delicious Chianti. The bartender tried to start a conversation, but Charles preferred silence, so when the man rattled on about George Michael, “certainly the greatest singer in the world,” he didn’t bother contradicting or agreeing. The man’s banter became dull background noise.
Someone had left behind a copy of the day’s Herald Tribune, and he mused over the stories for a while, in particular a statement by U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld that “according to some estimates we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions,” which amounted to about a quarter of the Pentagon budget. A certain Senator Nathan Irwin from Minnesota, breaking party ties, called it “a damned disgrace.” Not even that could hold his attention, though, and he folded the paper and put it aside.
He wasn’t thinking about suicide, but about the Bigger Voice, that thing his mother used to discuss with him during her occasional nocturnal visits in the seventies, when he was a child in North Carolina. “Look at everyone,” she told him, “and see what guides them. Little voices—television, politicians, priests, money. Those are the little voices, and they blot out the one big voice we all have. But listen to me—the little voices mean nothing. All they do is deceive. You understand?”
He’d been too young to understand, and too old to admit his ignorance. Her visits never lasted long enough for her to explain it well enough. He was always tired when she arrived in the middle of the night to rap on his window and carry him out to the nearby park.
“I am your mom, but you won’t call me mom. I won’t let you be oppressed, and I won’t let you oppress me with that word. You won’t even call me Ellen—that’s my slave name. My liberation name is Elsa. Can you say that?”
“Elsa.”
“Excellent.”
His early childhood was punctuated by these dreams—because that’s how they felt to him: dreams of a ghost-mother’s visitations with her brief lesson plans. In a year, she might come three or four times; when he was eight, she came nightly for an entire week and focused her lessons on his liberation. She explained that when he was a little older—twelve or thirteen—she would take him away with her, because by then he would be able to understand the doctrine of total war. Against whom? Against the little voices. Though he understood so little, he was excited by the thought of disappearing into the night with her. But he never did. After that intense week, the dreams never returned, and only much later would he learn that she’d died before she could bring him into the fold. In a German prison. By suicide.
Was that the Bigger Voice? The voice that spoke from the stone walls of Stuttgart’s Stammheim Prison, convincing her to remove her prison pants, tie one leg to the bars on her door, the other to her neck, and then sit down with all the enthusiasm of a zealot?
He wondered if she could have done that had she kept her real name. Could she have done it if she had still called herself a mother? He wondered if he could have survived these last years, or chosen so casually to end his life, if he had kept hold of his own name.
There he was again, back to thoughts of suicide.
When the restaurant closed at ten, he again checked Ugrimov’s front door, then jogged westward, sometimes frustrated by dead ends, until he’d reached the waterside porticos of the Scuola Vecchia della Misericordia. The third door, Grainger had said, so he counted to three, then, despite his stomach again acting up, lay flat on the cobblestones to reach over the edge of the walkway, down toward the rancid-smelling canal.
Unable to see, he had to do it by feel, touching stones until he felt the one that was different from the others. By now, these selected cubbyholes were over fifty years old, having been added to the architecture of postwar Europe by the members of the Pond, a CIA precursor. Remarkable foresight. Many had been discovered, while others had broken open on their own from poor workmanship, but occasionally the surviving ones proved invaluable. He closed his eyes to help his sense of touch. On the bottom edge of the stone was a latch; he pulled it, and the stone separated into his hand. He placed the lid beside himself and reached inside the exposed hole to find a weighty plastic-wrapped object, sealed airtight. He took it out, and in the moonlight ripped it open. Inside lay a Walther P99 with two clips of ammunition, all like new.
He replaced the stone’s cover, returned to Barba Fruttariol, and worked his way around the area, circling the palazzo as he wandered dark side streets, always returning at different angles to watch the front door or peer up to the lights along Roman Ugrimov’s terrace. Sometimes he spotted figures up there—Ugrimov, his guards, and a young girl with long, straight brown hair. The “niece.” But only the guards passed through the front door, returning with groceries, bottles of wine and liquor, and, once, a wooden humidor. After midnight he heard music wafting down—opera—and was surprised by the choice.
While the mewing cats ignored him, a total of three drunks tried to become his friend that night. Silence worked on all except the third, who put his arm around Charles’s shoulder and talked in four languages, trying to find the one that would make him answer. In a swift and unexpected surge of emotion, Charles thrust his elbow into the man’s ribs, cupped a hand over his mouth, and punched him twice, hard, on the back of his head. With the first hit, the man gurgled; with the second, he passed out. Charles held the limp man a few seconds, hating himself, then dragged him down the street, across an arched bridge spanning the Rio dei Santi Apostoli, and hid the drunk in an alley.
Balance—that word returned to him as he crossed the bridge again, trembling. Without balance, a life is no longer worth the effort.
He’d been doing his particular job for six—no, seven—years, floating unmoored from city to city, engaged by transatlantic phone calls from a man he hadn’t seen in two years. The phone itself was his master. Weeks sometimes passed without work, and in those periods he slept and drank heavily, but when he was on the job there was no way to stop the brutal forward movement. He had to suck down whatever stimulants would keep him in motion, because the job had never been about keeping Charles Alexander in good health. The job was only about the quiet, anonymous maintenance of the kindly named “sphere of influence,” Charles Alexander and others like him be damned.
Angela had said, “There is no other side anymore,” but there was. The other side was multifaceted: Russian mafias, Chinese industrialization, loose nukes, and even the vocal Muslims camped in Afghani stan who were trying to pry Washington’s fingers off the oil-soaked Middle East. As Grainger would put it, anyone who could not be embraced or absorbed by the empire was anathema and had to be dealt with, like barbarians at the gates. That was when Charles Alexander’s phone would ring.
He wondered how many bodies padded the murky floor of these canals, and the thought of joining them was, if nothing else, a comfort. It is because of death that death means nothing; it’s because of death that life means nothing.
Finish the job, he thought. Don’t go out in failure. And then …
No more planes and border guards and customs people; no more lookingover your shoulder.
By five, it was decided. The prescient glow before dawn lit the sky, and he dry-swallowed two more Dexedrine. The jitters returned. He remembered his mother and her dreams of a utopia with only big voices. What would she think of him? He knew: She would want to beat him senseless. He’d spent his entire adult life working for the procurers and manufacturers of those insidious little voices.
When, at nine thirty, the George Michael fan unlocked the osteria again, Charles was surprised to find himself still breathing. He ordered two espressos and waited patiently by the window while the man cooked up a pancetta, egg, garlic, oil, and linguine mix for his dour, sickly customer. It was delicious, but halfway through his plate he stopped, peering out the window.
Three people were approaching the palazzo. The bodyguard he’d seen yesterday—Nikolai—and, close behind, a very pregnant woman with an older man. That older man was Frank Dawdle.
He dialed his cell phone.
“Yeah?” said Angela.
“He’s here.”
Charles pocketed the phone and laid down money. The bartender, serving an old couple, looked angry. “You don’t like the breakfast?”
“Leave it out,” Charles said. “I’ll finish it in a minute.”
By the time Angela arrived, her hair damp from an interrupted shower, the visitors had been inside the palazzo for twelve minutes. There were four tourists along the length of the street, and he hoped they would clear out soon. “You have a gun?” Charles asked as he took out his Walther.
Angela pulled back her jacket to show off a SIG Sauer in a shoulder holster.
“Keep it there. If someone has to get shot, I better do it. I can disappear; you can’t.”
“So you’re watching out for me.”
“Yeah, Angela. I am watching out for you.”
She pursed her lips. “You’re also afraid I won’t be able to shoot him.” Her gaze dropped to his trembling gun hand. “But I’m not sure you’ll even be able to shoot straight.”
He squeezed the Walther until the shaking lessened. “I’ll do fine. You get over there,” he said, pointing at a doorway just beyond, and opposite, the palazzo’s entrance. “He’ll be boxed in. He comes out, we make the arrest. Simple.”
“Simple,” she replied curtly, then walked to her assigned doorway as the tourists, thankfully, left the street.
Once she was out of sight, he reexamined his hand. She was right, of course. Angela Yates usually was. He couldn’t go on like this, and he wouldn’t. It was a miserable job; it was a miserable life.
The palazzo’s front door opened.
Bald Nikolai opened it, but remained inside, his tailored jacket arm holding the bloated wooden door so that the pregnant woman— who Charles could now see was very beautiful, her bright green eyes flashing across the square—could step over the threshold and onto the cobbles. Then came Dawdle, touching her elbow. He looked every one of his sixty-two years, and more.
The bodyguard closed the door behind them, and the woman turned to say something to Dawdle, but Dawdle didn’t answer. He was looking at Angela, who had emerged from her doorway and was running in his direction. “Frank!” she shouted.
Charles had missed his cue. He began running, too, the Walther in his hand.
A man’s voice shouted from the sky in easy English: “And her Ilove, you bastard!” Then a rising wail, like a steam-engine whistle, filled the air.
Unlike the other three people in the street, Charles didn’t look up. Distractions, he knew, are usually just that. He hurtled forward. The pregnant woman, eyes aloft, screamed and stepped back. Frank Dawdle was stuck to the ground. Angela’s flared jacket dropped as she halted and opened her mouth, but made no sound. Beside the pregnant woman, something pink hit the earth. It was 10:27 A.M.
He stumbled to a stop. Perhaps it was a bomb. But bombs weren’t pink, and they didn’t hit like that. They exploded or crashed into the ground with hard noises. This pink thing hit with a soft, wretched thump. That’s when he knew it was a body. On one side, spread among the splash of blood on the cobblestones, he saw a scatter of long hair—it was the pretty girl he’d spotted on the terrace last night.
He looked up, but the terrace was again empty. The pregnant woman screamed, tripped, and fell backward.
Frank Dawdle produced a pistol and shot wildly three times, the sound echoing off the stones, then turned and ran. Angela bolted after him, shouting, “Stop! Frank!”
Charles Alexander was trained to follow through with actions even when faced with the unpredictable, but what he saw—the falling girl, the shots, the fleeing man—each thing seemed only to confuse him more.
How did the pregnant woman fit into this?
His breathing was suddenly difficult, but he reached her. She kept screaming. Red face, eyes rolling. Her words were a garbled mess.
His chest really did feel strange, so he sat heavily on the ground beside her. That’s when he noticed all the blood. Not the girl’s—she was on the other side of the hysterical woman—but his own. He could see that now. It pumped a red blossom into his shirt.
How about that? He was exhausted. Red rivulets filled the spaces between the cobblestones. I’m dead. Off to the left, Angela ran after the dwindling form of Frank Dawdle.
Amid the indecipherable noises coming from the pregnant woman, he heard one clear phrase: “I’m in labor!”
He blinked at her, wanting to say, But I’m dying, I can’t help you. Then he read the desperation in her sweaty face. She really did want to stay alive. Why?
“I need a doctor!” the woman shouted.
“I—” he began, and looked around. Angela and Dawdle had disappeared; they were just distant footfalls around a far corner.
“Get a fucking doctor!” the woman screamed, close to his ear. From around that far corner he heard the three short cracks of Angela’s SIG Sauer.
He took out his telephone. The woman was terrified, so he whispered, “It’ll be all right,” and dialed 118, the Italian medical emergency number. In stilted, too-quiet Italian from just one painful lung, he explained that a woman on the Rio Terrá Barba Fruttariol was having a baby. Help was promised. He hung up. His blood was no longer a network of rivulets on the ground; it formed an elongated pool.
The woman was calmer now, but she still gasped for breath. She looked desperate. When he gripped her hand, she squeezed back with unexpected strength. Over her heaving belly, he looked at the dead girl in pink. In the distance, Angela reappeared as a small form, hunched, walking like a drunk.
“Who the hell are you?” the pregnant woman finally managed.
“What?”
She took a moment to regulate her breaths, gritted her teeth. “You’ve got a gun.”
The Walther was still in his other hand. He released it; it clattered to the ground as a red haze filled his vision.
“What,” she said, then exhaled through pursed lips, blowing three times. “What the hell are you?”
He choked on his words, so he paused and squeezed her hand tighter. He tried again. “I’m a Tourist,” he said, though as he blacked out on the cobblestones he knew that he no longer was.
(#u091b7d02-b9dd-575e-8bcc-09ecba9ad902)
Part One (#u091b7d02-b9dd-575e-8bcc-09ecba9ad902)
Problems of the INTERNATIONAL TOURIST TRADE (#u091b7d02-b9dd-575e-8bcc-09ecba9ad902)
WEDNESDAY, JULY 4 TO
THURSDAY, JULY 19, 2007
1 (#u091b7d02-b9dd-575e-8bcc-09ecba9ad902)
The Tiger. It was the kind of moniker that worked well in Southeast Asia, or India, which was why the Company long assumed the assassin was Asian. Only after 2003, when those few photos trickled in and were verified, did everyone realize he was of European descent. Which raised the question: Why “the Tiger”?
Company psychologists, unsurprisingly, disagreed. The one remaining Freudian claimed there was a sexual dysfunction the assassin was trying to hide. Another felt it referenced the Chinese “tiger boys” myth, concerning boys who morphed into tigers when they entered the forest. A New Mexico analyst put forth her own theory that it came from the Native American tiger-symbol, meaning “confidence, spontaneity, and strength.” To which the Freudian asked in a terse memo, “When did the tiger become indigenous to North America?”
Milo Weaver didn’t care. The Tiger, who was now traveling under the name Samuel Roth (Israeli passport #6173882, b. 6/19/66), had arrived in the United States from Mexico City, landing in Dallas, and Milo had spent the last three nights on his trail, camped in a rental Chevy picked up from Dallas International. Little clues, mere nuances, had kept him moving eastward and south to the fringes of battered New Orleans, then winding north through Mississippi until late last night, near Fayette, when Tom Grainger called from New York. “Just came over the wire, buddy. They’ve got a Samuel Roth in Blackdale, Tennessee—domestic abuse arrest.”
“Domestic abuse? Can’t be him.”
“Description fits.”
“Okay.” Milo searched the cola-stained map flopping in the warm evening wind. He found Blackdale, a tiny speck. “Let them know I’m coming. Tell them to put him in solitary. If they’ve got solitary.”
By the time he rolled into Blackdale that Independence Day morning, his travel companions were three days’ worth of crumpled McDonald’s cups and bags, highway toll receipts, candy wrappers, and two empty Smirnoff bottles—but no cigarette butts; he’d at least kept that promise to his wife. In his overstuffed wallet he’d collected more receipts that charted his path: dinner at a Dallas-area Fuddruckers, Louisiana barbecue, motels in Sulphur, LA, and Brookhaven, MS, and a stack of gas station receipts charged to his Company card.
Milo shouldn’t have liked Blackdale. It was outside his comfortable beat of early twenty-first-century metropolises. Lost in the flag-draped kudzu wasteland of Hardeman County, between the Elvisology of Memphis and the Tennessee River’s tri-border intersection with Mississippi and Alabama, Blackdale didn’t look promising. Worse, it was as he drove into town that he realized there was no way he could make his daughter’s July Fourth talent show that afternoon back in Brooklyn.
Yet he did like Blackdale and its sheriff, Manny Wilcox. The sweating, overweight officer of the law showed surprising hospitality to someone from the most-despised profession, and didn’t ask a thing about jurisdiction or whose business their prisoner really was. That helped Milo’s mood. The too-sweet lemonade brought in by a mustached deputy named Leslie also helped. The station had a huge supply on tap in orange ten-gallon coolers, prepared by Wilcox’s wife, Eileen. It was just what Milo’s hangover had been pleading for.
Manny Wilcox wiped perspiration off his temple. “I will have to get your signature, understand.”
“I’d expect nothing less,” Milo said. “Maybe you can tell me how you caught him.”
Wilcox lifted his glass to stare at the condensation, then sniffed. Milo hadn’t showered in two days; the proof was all over the sheriff’s face. “Wasn’t us. His girl—Kathy Hendrickson. A N’Orleans working girl. Apparently she didn’t like his kind of lovemaking. Called 911. Said the man was a killer. Was beating on her.”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that. Picked him up late last night. I guess that’s how you guys got it, from the 911 dispatch. The hooker had a few bruises, a bloody lip. They were fresh. Verified his name with the passport. Israeli. Then we found another passport in his car. Eye-talian.”
“Fabio Lanzetti,” said Milo.
Wilcox opened his calloused hands. “There you go. We’d just squeezed him into the cell when your people called us.”
It was about two inches beyond belief. Six years ago, unbalanced and living under a different name, Milo had first run into the Tiger in Amsterdam. Over the ensuing six years, the man had been spotted and lost in Italy, Germany, the Arab Emirates, Afghani stan, and Israel. Now, he’d been trapped in a last-chance motel near the Mississippi border, turned in by a Louisiana prostitute.
“Nothing more?” he asked the sheriff. “No one else tipped you off? Just the woman?”
The flesh under Wilcox’s chin vibrated. “That’s it. But this guy, Sam Roth … is that even his real name?”
Milo decided that the sheriff deserved something for his hospitality. “Manny, we’re not sure what his name is. Each time he pops up on our radar, it’s different. But his girlfriend might know something. Where’s she now?”
The sheriff toyed with his damp glass, embarrassed. “Back at the motel. Had no cause to keep hold of her.”
“I’ll want her, too.”
“Leslie can pick her up,” Wilcox assured him. “But tell me—your chief said something about this—is that boy really called the Tiger?” “If it’s who we think it is, yes. That’s what he’s called.”
Wilcox grunted his amusement. “Not much of a tiger now. Pussycat, more like. He walks funny, too, kind of weak.”
Milo finished his lemonade, and Wilcox offered more. He could see how the police got hooked on Mrs. Wilcox’s homebrew. “Don’t be fooled, Sheriff. Remember last year, in France?”
“Their president?”
“Foreign minister. And in Germany there was the head of an Islamist group.”
“A terrorist?”
“Religious leader. His car exploded with him in it. And in London that businessman—”
“The one who bought the airline!” Wilcox shouted, happy to know at least this one. “Don’t tell me this joker killed him, too. Three people?”
“Those are the three from last year we can definitely pin on him. He’s been in business at least a decade.” When the sheriff’s brows rose, Milo knew he’d shared enough. No need to terrify the man. “But like I said, Sheriff, I need to talk to him to be sure.”
Wilcox rapped his knuckles on his desk, hard enough to shake the computer monitor. “Well, then. Let’s get you talking.”
2 (#u091b7d02-b9dd-575e-8bcc-09ecba9ad902)
The sheriff had moved three drunks and two spousal abusers to the group cell, leaving Samuel Roth alone in a small cinder-block room with a steel door and no window. Milo peered through the door’s barred hatch. A fluorescent tube burned from the ceiling, illuminating the thin cot and aluminum toilet.
To call his search for the Tiger obsessive would have been, according to Grainger, an understatement. In 2001, soon after he’d recovered from his bullet wounds in Vienna and retired from Tourism, Milo decided that while his coworkers devoted themselves to finding the Most Famous Muslim in the World somewhere in Afghani stan, he would spend his time on terrorism’s more surgical arms. Terrorist acts, by definition, were blunt and messy. But when someone like bin Laden or al-Zarqawi needed a specific person taken out, he, like the rest of the world, went to the professionals. In the assassination business, there were few better than the Tiger.
So over the last six years, from his twenty-second-floor cubicle in the Company office on the Avenue of the Americas, he’d tracked this one man through the cities of the world, but never close enough for an arrest.
Now, here he was, the man from that embarrassingly meager file Milo knew so well, sitting comfortably on a cot, his back to the wall and his orange-clad legs stretched out, crossed at the ankles. Samuel Roth, or Hamad al-Abari, or Fabio Lanzetti—or five other names they knew of. The assassin didn’t check to see who was peering in at him; he left his arms knotted over his chest as Milo entered.
“Samuel,” Milo said as a deputy locked the door behind him. He didn’t approach, just waited for the man to look at him.
Even in this light, with its harsh shadows and the way it yellowed his skin, Roth’s face recalled the three other photographs back at the office. One from Abu Dhabi, as al-Abari, his features half obscured by a white turban. A second from Milan, as Lanzetti, at a café along the Corso Sempione, talking with a red-bearded man they’d never been able to identify. The third was CCTV footage from outside a mosque in Frankfurt, where he’d planted a bomb under a black Mercedes-Benz. Each remembered image matched these heavy brows and gaunt cheeks, the pitch eyes and high, narrow forehead. Sometimes a mustache or beard hid aspects of the face, but now his only mask was a three-day beard that grew to the top of his cheekbones. His skin was splotchy in this light, peeling from an old sunburn.
Milo remained beside the door. “Samuel Roth—that’s the name we’ll use for now. It’s easy to pronounce.”
Roth only blinked in reply.
“You know why I’m here. It has nothing to do with your problems with women. I want to know why you’re in the United States.”
“Кaк вac зoвут, мудаки?” said Roth.
Milo grimaced. He was going to have to go through the motions. At least a change of language would hide their talk from these Tennessee boys. In Russian, he answered, “I’m Milo Weaver, of the Central Intelligence Agency.”
Samuel Roth looked as if that were the funniest name he had ever heard.
“What?”
“Sorry,” Roth said in fluent English. He raised a hand. “Even after all this, I still didn’t expect it to work.” He had the flat, irregular accent of someone who’d absorbed too many.
“What didn’t you expect to work?”
“I’m lucky I even remember you. I forget a lot of things these days.”
“If you don’t answer my questions, I’ll hurt you. I am authorized.”
The prisoner’s eyes widened; they were bloodshot and tired.
“There’s only one reason you’d risk entering the country. Who are you supposed to kill?”
Roth chewed the inside of his cheek, then spoke in a laconic tone: “Maybe you, Company man.”
“We were tracking you since Barcelona—you know that? To Mexico, then Dallas, and that rented car to New Orleans where you picked up your girlfriend. Maybe you just wanted to know if she survived Katrina. You switched to your Italian passport—Fabio Lanzetti—before switching back in Mississippi. Changing names is a nice trick, but it’s not foolproof.”
Roth cocked his head. “You’d know that, wouldn’t you?”
“Would I?”
Samuel Roth wiped his dry lips with his fingers, stifling a cough. When he spoke, he sounded congested. “I’ve heard a lot about you. Milo Weaver—a.k.a. many other names. Alexander.” He pointed at Milo. “That’s the name I know best. Charles Alexander.”
“No idea what you’re talking about,” Milo said as nonchalantly as he could manage.
“You’ve got a long history,” Roth continued. “An interesting one. You were a Tourist.”
A shrug. “Everyone likes a vacation.”
“Remember 2001? Before those Muslims ruined business. Amsterdam. Back then, I only worried about people like you, people who work for governments, ruining my business. These days …” He shook his head.
Milo remembered 2001 better than most years. “I’ve never been to Amsterdam,” he lied.
“You’re curious, Milo Weaver. I’ve seen files on lots of people, but you … there’s no center to your history.”
“Center?” Milo moved two steps closer, an arm’s length from the prisoner.
Roth’s lids drooped over his bloodshot eyes. “There’s no motivation connecting the events of your past.”
“Sure there is. Fast cars and girls. Isn’t that your motivation?”
Samuel Roth seemed to like that. He wiped his mouth again to cover a large grin; above his sunburned cheeks his eyes looked very wet, sick. “Well, you’re certainly not motivated by your own well-being, or else you’d be somewhere else. Moscow, perhaps, where they take care of their agents. At least, where agents know how to take care of themselves.”
“Is that what you are? Russian?”
Roth ignored that. “Maybe you just want to be on the winning side. Some people, they like to bend with history. But history’s tricky. Today’s monolith is tomorrow’s pile of rocks. No.” He shook his head. “That’s not it. I think you’re loyal to your family now. That would make sense. Your wife and daughter. Tina and … Stephanie, is it?”
Involuntarily, Milo shot out a hand and gripped Roth’s shirt at the buttons, lifting him from the cot. This close, he could see that his dry, peeling face was riddled with pink sores. This was not sunburn. With his other hand, he squeezed Roth’s jaw to hold his face still. There was rot in the man’s breath. “No need to bring them into this,” Milo said, then let go. When Roth fell back onto the cot, his head knocked against the wall.
How had this man turned the interrogation around?
“Just trying to make conversation,” said Roth, rubbing the back of his skull. “That’s why I’m here, you know. To see you.”
Instead of questioning that, Milo went for the door. He could at least squelch Roth’s one voiced desire by removing himself from the room.
“Where are you going?”
Good—he sounded worried. Milo tapped the door, and one of the deputies started working the lock.
“Wait!” called Roth. “I have information!”
Milo jerked the door open as Roth again called, “Wait!” He didn’t slow down. He left the room and kept moving as the deputy pushed the steel door shut.
3 (#u091b7d02-b9dd-575e-8bcc-09ecba9ad902)
The sultry noontime heat swallowed him as he fooled with the new Company-issue Nokia he was still learning to master, finally finding the number. Between a parked blue-and-white and the dead shrubs around the station, he watched as storm clouds began to fill the sky. Grainger answered with a sharp “What is it?”
Tom Grainger sounded the kind of irate people are when they’ve been abruptly woken, but it was nearly noon. “I’m verifying it, Tom. It’s him.”
“Good. I don’t suppose he’s talking, is he?”
“Not really. But he is trying to piss me off. He’s seen a file on me. Knows about Tina and Stef.”
“Jesus. How’d he get that?”
“There’s a girlfriend. She might know something. They’re bringing her in now.” He paused. “But he’s sick, Tom. Really sick. I’m not sure he could make a journey.”
“What’s he got?”
“Don’t know yet.”
When Grainger sighed, Milo imagined him kicking back in his Aeron chair, gazing out his window across the Manhattan skyline. Faced with the dusty pale-brick buildings along Blackdale’s main street—half of them out of business but covered with Independence Day flags—Milo was suddenly jealous. Grainger said, “Just so you know—you’ve got one hour to make him talk.”
“Don’t tell me.”
“I’m telling you. Some jackass at Langley sent an e-mail off the open server. I’ve spent the last half hour fending off Homeland with make-believe. If I hear the word ‘jurisdiction’ one more time, I’ll have a fit.”
Milo stepped back as a deputy got into the police car and started it up. He returned to the station’s glass double doors. “My hopes are with the girlfriend. Whatever game he’s playing, he won’t play by my rules until I have something on him. Or if he’s under duress.”
“Can you put it to him there?”
Milo considered this as the police car left and another parked in its place. The sheriff might turn a blind eye to rough treatment, but he wasn’t sure about the deputies. There was something wide-eyed about them. “I’ll see once the girl’s here.”
“If Homeland hadn’t been shouting at me all morning, I’d tell you to break him out and bundle him for shipment. But we don’t have a choice.”
“You don’t think they’ll share him?”
His chief grunted. “It’s me who doesn’t want to share. Be a good boy and let them have him, but whatever he says to you is only for us. Okay?”
“Sure.” Milo noticed that the mustached deputy getting out of the car was Leslie, the one who’d been sent to pick up Kathy Hendrickson. He was alone. “Call you back,” Milo said and hung up. “Where’s the girl?”
Leslie held his wide-brimmed hat in his hands, nervously rotating it. “Checked out, sir. Late last night, couple hours after we released her.”
“I see, Deputy. Thanks.”
On the way back inside, Milo called home, knowing that at this hour no one would be there to pick up. Tina would check the messages from work once she realized he was running late. He kept it short and concise. He was sorry to miss Stephanie’s performance, but didn’t overplay his guilt. Besides, next week they’d all be together in Disney World, and he’d have plenty of time to make it up to his daughter. He suggested she invite Stephanie’s biological father, Patrick. “And videotape it, will you? I want to see.”
He found Wilcox in the break room, having a fight with the soda machine. “I thought you kept to lemonade, Manny.”
Wilcox cleared his throat. “I’ve had it up to here with lemons.” He wagged a chunky finger. “You let that slip to my wife, and I’ll have your ass on a platter.”
“Let’s make a deal.” Milo came closer. “I’ll keep your wife in the dark if you give me an hour alone with your prisoner.”
Wilcox straightened, head back, and peered down at him. “You’re talking alone-alone?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And you think that’s a good idea?”
“Why not?”
Sheriff Wilcox scratched the back of his flabby neck; his beige collar was brown from sweat. “Well, the papers are eating you guys up. Every day there’s another yokel shouting about CIA corruption. I mean, I know how to keep my mouth shut, but a small town like this …”
“Don’t worry. I know what I’m doing.”
The sheriff pursed his lips, deforming his big nose. “Matter of national security, is it?”
“The most national, Manny. And the most secure.”
4 (#u091b7d02-b9dd-575e-8bcc-09ecba9ad902)
When Milo returned to the cell, Samuel Roth sat up as if he’d been waiting for this chat, a sudden wellspring of energy at his disposal. “Hello again,” he said once the door had locked.
“Who showed you my file?”
“A friend. An ex-friend.” Roth paused. “Okay, my worst enemy. He’s seriously bad news.”
“Someone I know?”
“I don’t even know him. I never met him. Just his intermediary.”
“So he’s a client.”
Roth smiled, his dry lips cracking. “Exactly. He gave me some paperwork on you. A gift, he said, for some trouble he’d put me through. He said that you were the one who ruined the Amsterdam job. He also said you were running my case. That, of course, is why I’m here.”
“You’re here,” Milo said, reaching the center of the cell, “because you beat up a woman and thought she wouldn’t pay you back for it.”
“Is that what you really think?”
Milo didn’t answer—they both knew it was an unlikely scenario.
“I’m here,” Roth said, waving at the concrete walls, “because I wanted to talk to Milo Weaver, once known as Charles Alexander. Only you. You’re the only Company man who ever actually stopped me. You’ve got my respect.”
“In Amsterdam.”
“Yes.”
“That’s funny.”
“Is it?”
“Six years ago in Amsterdam, I was high on amphetamines. Completely strung out. I didn’t know half of what I was doing.”
Roth stared at him, then blinked. “Really?”
“I was suicidal. I tried to walk into your line of fire, just to finish myself off.”
“Well,” said Roth, considering the news. “Either I was never as good as I thought, or you’re so good you could beat me blind and drunk. So … it stands. You have even more of my respect now. And that’s a rare and wonderful thing.”
“You wanted to talk to me. Why not pick up a phone?”
The assassin rocked his head from side to side. “That, as you know, is unverifiable. I would’ve been handed to some clerk for an hour, answering questions. If he didn’t hang up on me, he would’ve called Tom—Tom Grainger, right?—and then the whole department would be involved. No. I only wanted you.”
“Still, there are easier ways. Cheaper ways.”
“Money doesn’t mean anything anymore,” Roth said patiently. “Besides, it was fun. I had to give one last chase. Not so difficult a chase that you’d lose me, but not so easy that the FBI or Homeland Security would stumble across me when I arrived in Dallas. No, I had to set up a trail outside the country that you—because you’ve been responsible for my case these last years—would be watching. Then I had to lead you around this enormous country. I’d hoped to make it all the way to Washington, or even to your home in Brooklyn, but it wasn’t to be. A lot of things weren’t to be. I wanted to go further. I wanted to really make you work.”
“Why?”
“If I had the time,” Roth explained, “I’d be elusive with you, because it’s a known fact that no decent intelligence operative believes anything he’s told. Each agent needs to beat it out of his subject, or, better yet, discover it on his own, without the subject ever realizing he’s slipped up. But, sadly, there’s no time. It has to be little Blackdale, and it has to be direct, because I won’t be around by tomorrow.”
“Going somewhere?”
Again, that smile.
Milo wasn’t ready to believe this. It was pride, of course, balking against the idea that someone had for the last three days been leading him by the nose. “And Kathy Hendrickson?”
“She only knows that I paid her well for her performance. Yes—and for her bruises. She doesn’t know why. Really, she knows nothing,” he said, then gasped his way into a retching cough. Once it passed, he looked at his hand. “Oh.” He showed his blood-speckled palm to Milo. “Faster than I’d hoped.”
“What is?”
“My death.”
Milo stared at the Tiger’s face, at what he’d wanted to believe were the symptoms of a difficult run through the southern states. Bloodshot eyes, fatigue, and the skin itself. That yellow pallor wasn’t from the fluorescents. “Diagnosis?”
“AIDS.”
“I see.”
The lack of sympathy didn’t faze Roth. “I talked to some doctors in Switzerland—the Hirslanden Clinic, Zürich. You can check on that if you like. Look up Hamad al-Abari. Those mountain Germans are smart. Some new procedure they’ve got to examine the rate of growth through the T-cell count—something like that. They can figure out when the HIV virus got in me. Five months ago, it turns out. February. That places me in Milan.”
“What were you doing in Milan?”
“I met my contact. The intermediary I mentioned before. He goes by the name Jan Klausner, but he can’t speak decent German or Czech. From his accent, he might be Dutch. Midforties. His red beard is the only real thing about him.”
Milo remembered that file photo of Fabio Lanzetti—Milan, the Corso Sempione, with a bearded man. “We’ve got a picture of you two together.”
“Good start.”
“He gave you a job?”
“He’s been feeding me jobs for years. Actually, the first one came six years ago, not long after Amsterdam. A surprise. I worried my failure there had made the rounds, that work would dry up. But then Jan showed up. The work was irregular—one or two a year—but it paid well. His last order was for January. A job in Khartoum. Mullah Salih Ahmad.”
Milo thought back. The Sudan. January.
In January, a popular radical cleric known for inflammatory pro-al-Qaeda speeches, Mullah Salih Ahmad, had disappeared. Two days later, his garroted corpse was found in his own backyard. It had been international news for about five minutes, quickly overcome by the continuing civil war in the western Darfur region, but in the Sudan it stayed brutally current, and the blame was placed on the president, Omar al-Bashir, who seldom let critics remain in the limelight, or out of jail. Demonstrations followed, met by battle-gear police with guns. In the last month, more than forty had been killed in riots.
“Who hired you?”
The energy seemed to go out of Roth, and he stared, unfocused, past his interrogator. Milo didn’t bother breaking the trance, though he imagined SUVs full of Homeland Security barreling down the dusty Tennessee roads toward them.
Finally, Roth shook his head. “Sorry. The doctors call it AIDS dementia. I lose track of stuff, forget things. Can hardly walk.” With effort, he swallowed. “Where were we?”
“Mullah Salih Ahmad. Who hired you to kill him?”
“Ah, yes!” Through a twitch of pain, Roth seemed pleased that he could still find that memory. “Well, I didn’t know, did I? I have this contact, Jan Klausner, maybe Dutch, a red beard,” he said, unaware of his repetition. “He tells me nothing about who’s hiring him. He just pays the money, and that’s all right by me. But then there was the Ahmad job, and Jan’s master cheated me on the money. Only paid two-thirds. Klausner says it’s because I didn’t follow the instructions, which were to brand the body with some Chinese pictograms.”
“Chinese?” Milo cut in. “Why Chinese?”
“Good question, but no one tells me anything. Klausner just asks why I didn’t do this. After all, I did have a metalworker make the brands. Sadly, though, the Sudan is not overflowing with expert machinists, and what I got turned out to be made of aluminum. Can you imagine? When I heated them up, the pictograms just melted.” He coughed again, as if his body weren’t built for so many words at a time. “No Chinese—that was Klausner’s excuse for his master coming up short.” Another cough.
Milo reached into his jacket and took out a small flask. “Vodka.”
“Thanks.” The assassin took a long swig, which only made him cough more blood across his prison oranges, but he didn’t let go of the flask. He raised a finger until the coughs had trickled away, then said, “I better get it out quick, no?”
“What did the pictograms say?”
“Something like: As promised, the end. Weird, huh?”
Milo nodded.
“I could have let it go, and I considered that. But that’s bad business. If people find out I let one customer cheat me, then …” He wiped his bloodstained lips. “You understand.”
“Of course.”
Roth coughed again, less wretched this time. “Anyway, I thought for obvious reasons that it was the Chinese. They’ve invested billions into that country for oil; they supply the government with guns. They’d want to protect their investment. But then … yes. I saw the newspapers. Everyone believed the president had it done. He’d been harassing Ahmad for years. So I had it, right? There was Jan Klausner’s master, at least for this job.” He blinked a few times, and Milo feared he’d drift off again, but then he was back. “I’m an impulsive worker. In other men that spells defeat, but somewhere along the way I made it work for me. Half-second decisions are part of the job, don’t you think?”
Milo didn’t dispute the point.
“President al-Bashir, it turned out, was on a diplomatic trip to Cairo. So, impulsively, I flew there. Fancy villa, all the security out. But I’m the Tiger, right? I figure a way in. All the way in. I find him in his bedroom—alone, luckily. And I put the question to him: Omar, why are you stiffing me? But listen to me, Milo Weaver. After we’ve gone through about twenty minutes’ rigmarole, I realize he doesn’t know anything about this. Did he want Ahmad dead? Sure. The man was a pain in his ass. But did he actually order the killing?” Roth shook his head. “Sadly, no. So, like the wind, I’m gone.”
He took a sip of Milo’s vodka, letting it sit on his tongue before easing it down his throat. He looked at the flask. “Rus sian?”
“Swedish.”
“It’s nice.”
Again, Milo waited.
After another medicinal sip, Roth said, “I thought it through again and decided to search for Jan Klausner instead. I did some research—I know people, you see. People who can help. Turns out that Jan Klausner is registered in Paris, but under the name Herbert Williams, American. I went to his address, which is of course fake, but this, I believe, is where I took my wrong turn. I must have been spotted. A week later, Jan—or Herbert—he contacted me. It’s February by then. He asked me to come to Milan again to collect the rest of my money. His master had realized the error of his ways.”
“So you went,” said Milo, interested despite himself.
“Money is money. Or, it used to be.” That grin, weary now. “It went smoothly. We met in a café—February fourteenth—and he handed me a shopping bag full of euros. He also handed me, as an apology, a file on Milo Weaver, once known as Charles Alexander. Your nemesis, he tells me. This man has been after you for half a decade.” Roth frowned. “Why would he do that, Milo? Why would he give me your file? Any idea?”
“I have no idea.”
Roth bobbed his eyebrows at this mystery. “Only later, in Switzerland, once they told me the approximate time I got infected, did I remember what happened. You see, there were metal chairs at that café. Aluminum wire. Very pretty, but at some point during our coffee, I felt a little pinch from the chair. Here.” He touched the underside of his right thigh. “Poked through my pants, right into my leg. I thought it was just a lousy factory job, a little sliver of metal. It drew blood. Klausner,” he said, shaking his head at the memory, almost amused, “he got the waitress over and started bawling her out. He said his friend—meaning me—would sue them. Of course, the waitress was pretty—all Milano waitresses are—and I had to calm things down.”
“That’s how you think you got it?”
Roth shrugged with some effort. “How else? I’m sure you know from your file that I’m celibate and that I don’t shoot drugs.”
Milo considered not replying, but finally admitted, “The file on you is pretty thin.”
“Oh!” That seemed to please the assassin.
All this time, Milo had remained standing in the center of the room. By now, the position felt awkward, so he settled on the foot of the cot, by Roth’s feet. On the assassin’s upper lip a thin trail of snot glimmered. “Who do you think Klausner’s master is?”
Roth stared at him, thinking it over. “It’s hard to know. The jobs I got from him, they were inconsistent, just like your personal history. I’d always wondered this—does Mr. Klausner-Williams represent one group, or many groups? I’ve gone back and forth, finally deciding that he represents one group.” He paused, perhaps for dramatic effect. “The global Islamic jihad.”
Milo opened his mouth, then shut it. Then: “Does this bother you?”
“I’m an artisan, Milo. The only thing that concerns me is the feasibility of the job.”
“So, terrorists paid you to get rid of Mullah Salih Ahmad, one of their own. That’s what you’re saying?”
Roth nodded. “Public killings and private killings serve different purposes. You of all people know that. You don’t think al-Qaeda’s only technique is to pack little boys with bombs and send them off to a heaven of virgins, do you? No. And the Sudan—at first, I couldn’t see it either. Then I started watching. Who’s winning now? Ignore Darfur for the moment. I’m talking about the capital. Khartoum. The Muslim extremist insurgency, that’s who’s winning. They have public support like never before. Ahmad’s killing was about the best gift those bastards ever got, and with a Chinese brand on his body it would’ve been even better—blame it on the Chinese investors who prop up the president.” He shook his head. “They’ll have an Islamic paradise in no time, thanks to me.”
Judging from his features, no one would have been able to tell how much this news excited Milo. He’d asked all his questions in the quiet way of the interrogator, as if no answer were more important than another. In that same way, he said, “There’s something I don’t understand, Roth. You learned that, five months ago, you caught HIV. You learned it in a Swiss clinic. Now, it’s nearly killed you. Why aren’t you on antiretrovirals? You could live well enough for decades.”
It was Roth’s turn to look passive as he studied Milo’s face. “Milo, your file on me must be very small indeed.” Finally, he explained: “The Science of Christianity makes pure the fountain, in order topurify the stream.”
“Who said that?”
“Are you a man of faith, Milo? I mean, beyond the limits of your family.”
“No.”
Roth seemed to take that seriously, as if wondering whose path was better. “It’s a tough thing. Faith talks you into doing things you might not want to do.”
“Who were you quoting?”
“Mary Baker Eddy. I’m a Christian Scientist.” He swallowed again, roughly.
“I’m surprised,” Milo admitted.
“Sure you are, but why? How many Catholic gangsters are there? How many Muslim killers? How many Torah-loving angels of death? Please. I may not have lived up to the Church’s tenets, but I’ll certainly die by them. God has seen fit to strike me down—and why wouldn’t He? If I were Him, I would’ve done it years ago.” He paused. “Of course, those Swiss doctors, they thought I was nuts. Nearly forced me to take the treatments. They kept finding me outside, under a tree, on my knees, praying. The power of prayer—it didn’t save my body, but it just might save my soul.”
“What does Mary Baker Eddy say about revenge?” asked Milo, irritated by this sudden fit of moral poetry. He supposed it was what happened to killers like the Tiger, shut-ins who avoided even the intimacy of sex. There was no one to bounce your thoughts off of, no one to remind you that what came from your mouth wasn’t necessarily wisdom. He pressed: “That’s why you’re here, right? You want me to take revenge on the person who’s killing you.”
Roth thought a moment, raised a finger (Milo noticed blood on his knuckle), and intoned: “To suppose that sin, lust, hatred, envy, hypocrisy,revenge, have life abiding in them, is a terrible mistake. Life andLife’s idea, Truth and Truth’s idea, never make men sick, sinful, or mortal.” He lowered his hand. “Revenge does not have a life of its own, but maybe justice does. You understand? I’ve given you all I have on him. It’s not much, but you’re a smart man. You’ve got resources. I think you can track him down.”
“What about the money?” said Milo. “How did Klausner pass it on to you? Always in a shopping bag?”
“Oh, no,” said Roth, pleased that Milo was asking. “Usually I’d be directed to a bank. Go in and empty an account. The banks changed, each account was opened under a different name, but I was always put down as a coholder. Under the Roth name.”
Milo stared at the man. Given all the bodies Samuel Roth had collected over the years, there was something inappropriate about this last wish. “Maybe he’s done me a service. He’s closed a few of my cases by killing you. Maybe this Klausner is my friend.”
“No.” Roth was insistent. “I did that for you. I could’ve died in obscurity in Zürich. It was certainly more picturesque. This way, I help you out. Maybe you’ll help me out. You’re a Tourist. You can catch him.”
“I’m not a Tourist anymore.”
“That’s like saying, I’m not a murderer anymore. You can change your name, change your job description—you can even become a bourgeois family man, Milo. But really, nothing changes.”
Without realizing it, the Tiger had voiced one of Milo Weaver’s greatest fears. Before his apprehension could show, he changed the subject. “Does it hurt?”
“Very much. Here.” Roth touched his chest. “And here.” He touched his groin. “It’s like metal in the blood. You remember everything I’ve said?”
“Answer one question, will you?”
“If I can.”
It was something Milo had wondered for the last six years, ever since he’d decided to focus his efforts on the assassin whose bullets he’d once tried to face. He’d learned a lot about the Tiger, even backtracking to find his first verified assassination in November 1997, Albania. Adrian Murrani, the thirty-year-old chairman of the Sineballaj commune. Everyone knew Murrani had been ordered killed by the ruling neo-communists—it was a year of many sudden deaths in Albania—but in this case the gunman had been hired from abroad. Despite the stacks of physical and eyewitness evidence collected from the assassinations that followed, Milo had never come close to answering the most basic mystery about this man: “Who are you, really? We never found a real name. We didn’t even figure out your nationality.”
The Tiger smiled again, flushing. “I suppose that’s a kind of victory, isn’t it?”
Milo admitted that it was impressive.
“The answer is in your files. Somewhere in that tower facing the Avenue of the Americas. See, the only difference between you and me is that we chose different ways of tendering our resignations.”
Milo’s thoughts stuttered briefly before he understood. “You were a Tourist.”
“Brothers in arms,” he said, his smile huge. “And later, you’ll wish you’d asked another question. Know what it is?”
Milo, still spinning from the realization of Roth’s Company past, had no idea what the question could be. Then it occurred to him, because it was simple, and the assassin’s mood was so simple. “Why ‘the Tiger?’”
“Precisely! However, the truth is a disappointment: I have no idea. Someone, somewhere, first used it. Maybe a journalist, I don’t know. I guess that, after the Jackal, they needed an animal name.” He shrugged—again, it looked painful. “I suppose I should be pleased they didn’t choose a vulture, or a hedgehog. And no—before you think to ask, let me assure you I wasn’t named after the Survivor song.”
Despite everything, Milo smiled.
“Let me ask you something,” Roth said. “What’s your opinion on the Black Book?”
“The What Book?”
“Stop pretending, please.”
Within the subculture of Tourism, the Black Book was the closest thing to the Holy Grail. It was the secret guide to survival, rumored to have been planted by a retired Tourist, twenty-one copies hidden in locations around the world. The stories of the Black Book were as old as Tourism itself. “It’s bunk,” said Milo.
“We’re in agreement,” Roth answered. “When I first went freelance, I thought it might be useful, so I spent a couple years looking for it. It’s a figment of some overactive imaginations. Maybe Langley first spread it, maybe some bored Tourist. But it’s a nice idea.”
“You think so?”
“Sure. Something stable and direct in our befuddled world. A bible for living.”
“Luckily for you, you have the Bible itself.”
Roth nodded, and when he spoke again, his tone was earnest. “Please. You and me, we’re enemies—I understand that. But trust me: The man who did this to me is much worse than I am. You’ll at least look into it?”
“Okay,” said Milo, not sure how long his promise would last.
“Good.”
Samuel Roth hunched forward and lightly patted Milo’s knee, then leaned back against the wall. Without ceremony, he clenched his teeth. Something crunched in his mouth, like a nut, and Milo smelled the almond bitterness in Roth’s exhale. It was a smell he’d run into a few times in his life, from people either utterly devout or utterly frightened. The hard way out, or the easiest, depending on your philosophy.
The assassin’s veined eyes widened, close enough that Milo could see his own reflection in them. Roth seized up three times in quick succession, and Milo caught him before he fell off the cot. The yellow-tinted head rolled back, lips white with froth. Milo was holding a corpse.
He dropped the body on the cot, wiped his hands against his pants, and backed up to the door. It had been years since he’d faced this, but even back then, when he saw death more often, he’d never gotten used to it. The sudden heft. The fast cooling. The fluids that leaked from the body (there—Roth’s orange jumpsuit darkened at the groin). The quick cessation of consciousness, of everything that person—no matter how despicable or virtuous—had experienced. It didn’t matter that minutes ago he’d wanted to ridicule this man’s false piousness. That wasn’t the point. The point was that, within this concrete cell, a whole world had suddenly ceased to exist. In a snap, right in front of him. That was death.
Milo came out of his daze when the door against his back shook. He stepped away so Sheriff Wilcox could come in, saying, “Listen, I got some folks here who—”
He stopped.
“Christ,” the sheriff muttered. Fear stalled in his face. “What the hell’d you do to him?”
“He did it to himself. Cyanide.”
“But … but why?”
Milo shook his head and started for the door, wondering what Mary Baker Eddy said about suicide.
5 (#u091b7d02-b9dd-575e-8bcc-09ecba9ad902)
Special Agent Janet Simmons gazed at Milo across the scratched white table in the Blackdale interview room. Despite his size, her partner, Special Agent George Orbach, was clearly the inferior in their relationship. He kept getting up to leave the room, awkwardly returning with Styrofoam cups of water and coffee and lemonade.
Simmons had a fluid, engaging interview style, which Milo supposed was part of Homeland’s new training. She leaned forward a lot, hands open except when she pulled a strand of dark hair behind her ear. Early thirties, Milo guessed. Sharp, attractive features marred only by a right eye that wandered. The ways she positioned her beauty were supposed to close the psychological distance between interviewer and interviewee, making it less adversarial. She even pretended not to notice his stink.
After sending George Orbach out again to find milk for her coffee, she turned to him. “Come on, Milo. We’re on the same side here. Right?”
“Of course we are, Janet.”
“Then tell me why the Company’s working out of its jurisdiction on this one. Tell me why you’re keeping secrets from us.”
Mrs. Wilcox’s delicious lemonade was starting to give Milo a sugar high. “I’ve explained it,” he said. “We’ve been after Roth for years. We learned he’d crossed the border in Dallas, so I went to Dallas.”
“And you never thought to call us?” She arched her brow. “We do have a Dallas office, you know.”
Milo wondered how to put it. “I decided—”
“I? Tom Grainger no longer makes decisions in New York?”
“I advised,” he corrected, “that if Homeland Security were brought in, you’d send in the cavalry. The Tiger would spot it in a second, and go underground. The only way to track him was with a single person.”
“You.”
“I’ve followed his case a long time. I know his modus operandi.”
“And look how well that worked out.” Simmons winked—winked. “Another successful day for Central Intelligence!”
He refused to meet her challenge. “I think I’m being very helpful, Janet. I’ve told you that he had a cap of cyanide in his mouth. He didn’t like the idea of living in Gitmo, so he bit. You could blame Sheriff Wilcox for not giving him a cavity search, but I don’t think that would be fair.”
“He talked to you.” Her tone became gentle; her wandering eye came back in line. “You had a conversation. That deputy with the girl’s name—”
“Leslie.”
“Right. He said you had twenty minutes alone with him.”
“More like fifteen.”
“So?”
“Yes?”
Admirably, Simmons didn’t raise her voice. “So, what did you talk about?”
“A man like that, a superstar assassin—he needs more than fifteen minutes to start talking.”
“So you just sat there? Staring at each other?”
“I asked him questions.”
“Did you touch him?”
Milo cocked his head.
“Did you try to beat the information out of him, Milo?”
“Certainly not,” he said. “That’s against the law.”
She looked as if she were going to smile at that, but changed her mind. “You know what I think? I think you and the whole Company—you’re desperate. You’ve lost whatever shred of credibility you had left, and you’ll do anything to keep hold of your pensions. You’ll even kill for that.”
“It sounds like you’ve put some real thought into this.”
She let the smile appear this time; perhaps she thought he was joking. “Tell me what the Tiger had on you that was so damaging. Tom wasn’t running him, was he? For your dirty little jobs? I don’t know what you guys do in your tower, but I suspect it’s pretty nasty.”
Milo was surprised by her vehemence, but he was more surprised by her superiority. “I suppose Homeland doesn’t have any secrets?”
“Sure, but we’re not the ones on public trial. It’s not our time yet.”
George Orbach pushed his way into the room, clutching a handful of paper packets. “No milk. Just this powder.”
Janet Simmons seemed disgusted by the news. “Doesn’t matter,” she said, crossing her arms. “Mr. Weaver is leaving now. He’s in need of a good shower. I think we’ll have to talk to Mr. Grainger instead.”
Milo rapped the table with his knuckles and got up. “Please don’t hesitate to get in touch.”
“Fat lot of good that’ll do me.”
The morning storm had left as soon as it had arrived, leaving behind damp roads and moist, clean air. As he drove, Milo lit a Davidoff from the pack he’d broken down and bought when he filled up the tank. The smoke felt good, but then it didn’t, and he coughed hard, but kept smoking. Anything to cut the edge off the stink of death.
He hadn’t had his cell phone long enough to figure out how to change the ring tone, so when it woke up somewhere along Route 18 to Jackson, it played a stupid corporate melody. He checked to see if it was his wife, but it was Grainger. “Yeah?”
“Is what that bitch from Homeland says true? He’s dead?”
“Yeah.”
A pause. “Will I see you at the office today?”
“No.”
“I’ll catch you at the airport, then. We’ve got things to discuss.”
Milo hung up and turned on the radio, flipping through staticky country stations until, inevitably, he gave up and pulled out his iPod, which he’d listened to half this trip. He slipped in the earbuds, clicked the French playlist, and skipped to track five.
His head was filled with the quick, swirling melody of “Poupéede cire, poupée de son,” sung by France Gall, Luxembourg’s 1965 Eurovision winner, penned by Serge Gainsbourg. The very tune he’d taught Stephanie for her talent show, the performance he was missing.
He dialed Tina. Her voice mail picked up, and he listened to her story about not being in and the promise of a call if he left a message. He knew she was already at the show, next to an empty chair, watching their daughter sing Gainsbourg’s phenomenal hit. He didn’t leave a message. He’d just wanted to hear her voice.
6 (#u091b7d02-b9dd-575e-8bcc-09ecba9ad902)
Tina couldn’t figure out what kind of idiot parents would think to dress their seven-year-old girl in pink tights and a tank top, tie a pair of pink angel’s wings to her frail back, and then cover every inch with glistening sequins. You could hardly see the child from the spotlight’s reflection as she pranced left and right on the stage to some dance beat with electric guitars, singing a warbling version of “I Decide,” from (the principal had told everyone) “that hit Disney movie, The Princess Diaries2.” It might have been a good song, but from her seat near the center of the Berkeley Carroll School’s auditorium, Tina could only make out the thump of the bass drum and see a little glittering girl-shape shift around on that painfully bare stage.
But of course she clapped. They all did. Two stood and hooted—the idiot parents, Tina assumed. Beside her, in what should have been Milo’s seat, Patrick struck his palms together and whispered, “In-fucking-credible! I’m getting my friends at CAA to sign up this one, ASAP.”
Tina hadn’t wanted to call Patrick, but with Milo pulling another no-show, Stef deserved as full an audience as possible. “Be nice,” she said.
Milo had left another of his curt, unapologetic messages on their home phone, saying that there’d been a delay. As usual, he didn’t call the delay by any name, just “delay.”
Fine, she’d thought. Miss your daughter’s talent show, and I’ll bringher real father.
Then Milo himself had suggested calling Patrick. “For Stef. And videotape it, will you?”
That had taken some of the wind out of Tina’s anger—that, and the fact that, for the last three days, Patrick had been trying to get her and Stephanie to come back to him. Milo, off on his vague, sudden business trip, had no idea.
Her reaction to Patrick’s initial attempt had been to walk the phone to the kitchen so her daughter wouldn’t hear her say, “Are you on drugs, Patrick?”
“Of course not,” said her ex … boyfriend sounded silly, but they’d never actually married. “How could you even think that? You know how I feel about drugs.”
“I bet you’ve put away a few scotches.”
“Listen,” he said, trying to sound reasonable. “I look back now—I look back over all of it. I look back decades. What do I see? Two glowing years. The only two years I was really happy. With you. That’s what I want to tell you. It was never better than that.”
“I like Paula,” she told him as she absently rubbed a sponge around the spotted aluminum sink. “She’s a smart girl. Why she married you, I’ll never know…”
“Ha ha,” he said, and that’s when she knew he really was drunk. She heard him take a drag off of one of his stinking cigarillos. “I’m the joke of the century. But think about it. Think about me. Remember how in love we were.”
“Wait a minute. Where is Paula?”
Another long cigarillo-drag. “Your guess is as good as mine.”
That, then, had clarified everything. “She’s walked out on you. And after six years, you’re running back to me? You must be seriously drunk, Pat. Or seriously stupid.”
Onstage, a boy in a Superman outfit was delivering a monologue, a heavy lisp making the words hard to decipher. Patrick leaned close: “He’s gonna fly soon. I can see the string attached to his belt.”
“He’s not going to fly.”
“If he does, I’ll buy him his first martini.”
Patrick’s long face and graying three-day beard earned him extra clients at Berg & DeBurgh. They thought that he, unlike his over-the-hill law partners, looked vital. These days, though, with the bruised shade to his weary eyes, he looked more desperate than vital. Paula Chabon, that Lebanese-French bombshell who sold her own line of jewelry at little boutique shops positioned in many world capitals, had moved to Berlin. An ex-lover had wooed her back. More than anything, Patrick wanted to believe he could do the same thing, that he could woo Tina back. He really was pitiful.
Superboy ended his monologue by running around the stage in mock flight, but the cape hung sadly against his back, and Patrick was annoyed that his feet never left the ground. “Turn on the video,” Tina told him after the obligatory applause.
Patrick tugged a small Sony video camera out of his pocket. When he turned it on, the two-inch screen glowed.
Without thinking, Tina squeezed his knee. “Here comes Little Miss!”
But the Berkeley Carroll principal came on first, squinting at the card in her hand. “Please welcome our first grader Stephanie Weaver, as she performs …” The woman frowned, trying to make out the words. “Poop-ee de sirk, poop-ee de son.”
Titters rippled through the audience. Tina reddened. How could this bitch not have learned how to pronounce it first?
The principal snickered, too. “My French isn’t what it used to be. But, in English, this is, ‘Wax Doll, Sawdust Doll,’ written by Serge Gainsbourg.”
The crowd duly applauded, and as the principal left the stage Stephanie entered, walking flat but proud to the center. She was, without a doubt, the best dressed of the bunch. Milo had spent a whole weekend with Stephanie in the Village searching retro shops for the proper one-piece dress and tights. Then he’d scoured the Internet, discovering midsixties haircuts. Tina had found it all a bit much, and the idea of dressing their child in forty-year-old styles a little pompous—but now, seeing how the washed-out browns of the dress and the striped stockings glowed, just faintly, under the spotlights, and how her bobbed hair hung perfectly straight along the sides …
Beside her, watching their daughter, Patrick was speechless.
There was a click from the speakers, a CD spinning, and then an orchestral melody that grew into a wall of sound with a swift beat. Stephanie began to sing, those French words perfectly formed.
Je suis une poupée de cire,
Une poupée de son
When she couldn’t get her daughter in focus, Tina realized she was crying. Milo had been right all along. It was beautiful. She glanced at Patrick gaping at that little screen, muttering, “Wow.” Maybe this would finally convince him that Milo was A-OK, despite what he’d believed yesterday when he called her office, at Columbia’s Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library.
“I don’t like him.”
“What?” Tina had snapped back, already irritated. “What did you say?”
“Milo.” She could tell he was slipping into an afternoon buzz, maybe one of his famous five-martini lunches. “I’m talking about Milo Weaver. I never trusted him, not with you, and certainly not with my daughter.”
“You never even tried to like him.”
“But what do you know about him? He’s just some guy you met in Italy, right? Where’s he from?”
“You know all this. His parents died. He’s from—”
“North Carolina,” Patrick cut in. “Yeah, yeah. How come he’s got no southern accent?”
“He’s traveled more than you know.”
“Right. A traveler. And his orphanage—he told me it was the Saint Christopher Home for Boys. That place burned to the ground in 1989. Pretty conve nient, don’t you think?”
“I think it’s pretty conve nient you know this stuff, Pat. You’ve been snooping.”
“I’m allowed to snoop when the welfare of my daughter’s at stake.”
Tina tried to purge that conversation from her head, but it kept banging at her as Stephanie sang, her voice carrying crystal-clear through the auditorium. Tina didn’t even know what the song meant, but it was gorgeous.
“Look, Pat. I could bitch about how you left me when I was pregnant and needed you most, but I’m not angry about that anymore. The way things ended up … I’m happy. Milo treats us well; he loves Stephanie like his own. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
Stephanie’s pitch rose, the music swirling around her. She nearly bellowed the last lines, then fell silent. A final few bars of music, as Stephanie rocked in the same nonchalant dance she’d seen France Gall do in that Eurovision performance Milo tracked down on YouTube. She looked so cool, so hipper-than-thou.
Patrick repeated, “Wow.”
Tina whistled, standing and shouting, swinging her fist in the air, exhilarated. Some other parents stood and clapped, and Tina didn’t care if they were just being polite. She felt giddy all over. Milo really would’ve loved this.
7 (#u091b7d02-b9dd-575e-8bcc-09ecba9ad902)
It had been a lousy year and a half for the Company. No one could say exactly where the trail of bad luck had started, which meant that the blame leapfrogged up and down the hierarchy depending on the public mood, pausing to wreak havoc on this or that career. News cameras arrived to witness early retirements and awkward dismissals.
Before moving on, these humiliated unemployed dropped in on Sunday morning television roundtables to spread the blame further. It was the ex–assistant director, a soft-spoken career spook, now exceedingly bitter, who best summed up the general consensus.
“Iraq, of course. First, the president blames us for supplying bad information. He blames us for not killing Osama bin Laden before his big act of public relations. He blames us for uniting both of those failures into a disastrous, unending war, as if we pointed him to Iraq. We defend ourselves with facts—facts, mind you—and suddenly the president’s allies in Congress begin to pick us apart. What a coincidence! Special investigation committees. If you spend enough money and look hard enough, all organizations turn up dirty. That, too, is a fact.”
Georgia Republican Harlan Pleasance was the one who really dropped the bomb, back in April 2006. He headed the second special investigation committee, which, based on the results of the first committee the previous month, focused on money trails. With access to the CIA budget (a secret since the 1949 Central Intelligence Agency Act), Senator Pleasance wondered aloud how the Company could fund, for example, the recently uncovered ten-million-dollar gift to the unlikely named
, or Youth League, a militant Chinese democracy group based in the mountainous Guizhou province that had ironically named itself after the communist youth organization. It took less than three months for Senator Pleasance to report on CNN’s The Situation Room that the Chinese militants’ gift had come from part of the sale, in Frankfurt, of eighteen million euros’ worth of Afghan heroin, which had been clandestinely harvested by Taliban prisoners under U.S. Army guard. “And no one told us a thing about it, Wolf.”
It was an open secret within Langley that, while all this might be true, there was no human way to discover it from the existing paper trails. Another agency was feeding Senator Pleasance his information. Most believed it was Homeland, while others—and Milo was part of this group—believed it was the National Security Agency, which had a much older, historic beef with the CIA. It didn’t matter, though, because the public didn’t care where the information came from. The facts were just too enticing.
Whatever began the steady bloodletting, it was Pleasance’s discovery that turned it into a public, and international, massacre. First, the embarrassed Germans rolled back their historic support and shut down many joint operations. Then it became a race. Fresh special committees demanded financial records as minor politicians took a stab at national recognition, while Langley began incinerating hard drives. Louise Walker, a typist, was arrested for this, and after a lengthy meeting with her lawyer became convinced that the only way out was to give a name. That name was Harold Underwood, a low-level bureaucrat. Harold was also assigned a convincing lawyer.
So it went. Eighteen months from beginning to end, resulting in thirty-two arrests: seventeen acquittals, twelve jail terms, two suicides, and one disappearance. The new CIA director, whose approval was rushed through the nomination hearings, was a tiny but vociferous Texan named Quentin Ascot. In front of the Senate, on elevated heels, he made his position clear. No more black money. No more operations that hadn’t been approved by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. No more cowboy antics at Langley. “No more rogue departments. It’s a new world. We serve at the pleasure of the American people, who pay our bills. We should be an open book.”
The Company’s collective groan could be heard around the world.
The four secret floors of offices on the Avenue of the Americas, stocked with Travel Agents who focused on the running of, and assimilation of information collected by, Tourists based in all the populated continents, was (behind closed doors) considered a prime target for the inevitable cuts. Director Ascot, it was rumored, wanted to relieve the world of Tourism altogether. He claimed that Tourists, with open-ended resources and no need to collect receipts, would bankrupt the Company. But since he didn’t have enough internal support to erase the clandestine department, all he could do was slowly chew it up.
Milo learned of Ascot’s first tentative steps when he arrived at LaGuardia from Tennessee and met Tom Grainger in the airport security office. The old man had sent away the “rent-a-cops,” as he called most non-Company personnel, and through a two-way mirror they watched crowds jostling at the luggage carousel, the irregular flow of travelers along mass transit lines that had in recent years become national threat centers. Both men missed that almost-forgotten time when travel was about arriving someplace new, not about getting through the clunky measures of antiterrorist law.
“They’re starting the postmassacre frenzy,” Grainger said to the glass, a drawn look on his face.
Even by CIA standards, Tom Grainger was old—seventy-one years, most of his white hair lost to the shower drain, his cabinet full of prescription pills. He never appeared in public without a tie.
“The Grand Inquisitor has sent a memo through his under-lings—through Terence Fitzhugh, to be precise. I’m to prepare for executions, he says. Ascot’s predicting a war of attrition, and he’s getting me to take out my own people. It’s slow hara-kiri.”
Milo had known Grainger since 1990, when he’d been invited to become part of the Company’s clandestine world in London, and he knew the old man was always melodramatic when it came to Langley. His secret department in Manhattan was his private dominion, and it hurt him to be reminded that people in another state really pulled the strings. Maybe that was why he’d decided to appear at the airport, rather than wait for morning to talk in the office—no one here could listen to his bitching. “You’ve been through worse, Tom. We’ve all been through worse.”
“Hardly,” Grainger said dismissively. “One-quarter. That’s how much we’re losing. He’s giving me the heads-up. Next year we’ll work on one-quarter less funds, which’ll barely cover operational costs. I’m supposed to decide which Travel Agents get pink slips, and which get transferred to more public departments.”
“And the Tourists?”
“Aha! Too many. That’s the gist of it. Twelve slots for the whole of Europe, working around the clock, and yet I’m supposed to get rid of three of them. Bastard. Who does he think he is?”
“Your boss.”
“My boss wasn’t there when the planes came, was he?” The old man rapped a knuckle on the glass. A boy standing nearby turned to frown at the noisy mirror. “I guess you weren’t either, were you? You never did visit the old office … no.” He was fully engaged in his memories now. “You were still a Tourist, just barely, and we were sitting at our desks, drinking Starbucks, as if the world wasn’t preparing to explode.”
Milo had heard all this before, Grainger’s endless replay of September 11, when the former secret CIA office at 7 World Trade Center collapsed. It didn’t happen immediately, because the nineteen young men who hijacked four planes that morning didn’t realize that by hitting one of the smaller towers they could wipe out an entire Company department. Instead, they went for the glory of the enormous first and second towers, which gave Grainger and his staff time to flee in panic before the main targets crumbled, bringing number seven down with them.
“It was Beirut times fifty,” said Grainger. “All of Dresden stuffed into a few minutes. It was the first wave of barbarians coming to sack Rome.”
“It wasn’t any of those things. Is this what you needed to talk to me about?”
Grainger turned from the glass and frowned. “You’re sunburned.”
Milo leaned against the LaGuardia security supervisor’s messy desk and looked down. His left arm, which had hung out the driver’s side window, was definitely a different tone. “You want to just wait for my report?”
“They’ve been calling like mad,” said Grainger, ignoring the question. “Who’s this Simmons bitch?”
“She’s all right. Just angry. I would be, too.”
Through the window, luggage clattered down a conveyor belt as Milo outlined his conversation with the Tiger. “He wanted me to track down the people who stuck him with HIV. Terrorists, he thinks. Sudan connections.”
“Sudan. Great. But all he had for you was this one name. Herbert Williams. Or Jan Klausner. It’s pretty sketchy.”
“And the Hirslanden Clinic. He was there under the al-Abari alias.”
“We’ll look into it.”
Milo chewed the inside of his cheek. “Send Tripplehorn. He’s still in Nice, isn’t he?”
“You’re better than Tripplehorn,” said Grainger.
“I’m not a Tourist. Besides, I’m due in Florida on Monday.”
“Sure.”
“Really,” said Milo. “Me, the family, and Mickey Mouse.”
“So you keep telling me.”
They watched passengers press closer to the carousel, knocking into each other in an exhausted panic. To Milo’s annoyance, his boss sighed loudly. He knew what that meant, and that knowledge told him why Grainger had taken the trouble to come out to LaGuardia—he wanted to railroad Milo into another trip. “No, Tom.”
Grainger peered at the travelers, not bothering to reply. Milo would wait him out. He would stay silent, not even pass on the revelation that the Tiger had come from the ranks of their own Tourists. If it was true, Tom already knew it, and had kept this information from Milo for his own reasons.
Almost sadly, Grainger said, “Think you can head out tomorrow afternoon?”
“Absolutely not.”
“Ask me where.”
“Doesn’t matter. Tina’s on the warpath. I missed Stephanie’s show.”
“Not to worry. I called an hour ago with a personal apology for sending you out. I took the responsibility on my own shoulders.”
“You’re a real saint.”
“Sure I am. I informed her that you were saving the free world.”
“She stopped believing that long ago.”
“Librarians.” Grainger sniffed at the travelers. “You should’ve listened to me. There are absolutely no odds in marrying smart women.”
Truth was, Grainger actually had given him this advice a week before he and Tina married. It had always made him wonder about Terri, Grainger’s now-deceased wife. “Might as well tell me about it,” he said. “But no promises.”
Grainger patted his back with a heavy hand. “See? That wasn’t so hard.”
8 (#u091b7d02-b9dd-575e-8bcc-09ecba9ad902)
It took them most of the sunset hour to reach Park Slope, the Brooklyn neighborhood Milo had grown to love over the last five years. When they were apartment hunting, Stephanie still just a baby, Tina had been immediately taken by the brownstones and upscale cafés, the cozy, soft-edged world of dot-com kids and successful novelists; it took Milo a while longer.
Family life was a different beast from what he’d known before—unlike Tourism, it actually was life. So he learned. First, to accept, and after acceptance came affection. Because the Slope wasn’t about the nouveau riche torturing café workers with elaborate nonfat coffee specifications; Park Slope was about Milo Weaver’s family.
The Tiger had called him a bourgeois family man. In that, at least, the assassin had been right on the mark.
At Garfield Place, he climbed out of Grainger’s Mercedes with a promise to talk the next morning in the office. But he knew, as he mounted the narrow interior stairs of their brownstone, that he had already made up his mind. Family man or not, he was going to Paris.
At the third floor, he heard a television. When he rang the bell Stephanie shouted, “Door! Mom, door!” Then Tina’s quick footsteps and, “Coming.” When she opened it, she was buttoning her shirt. Once she had him focused, she crossed her arms over her breasts and in a high whisper said, “You missed her show.”
“Didn’t Tom talk to you?”
He tried to come in, but she wouldn’t step out of the way. “That man will say anything to cover for you.”
It was true, so he didn’t dispute it. He just waited for her to make up her mind. When she did, she grabbed his shirt, pulled him close, and kissed him fully on the lips. “You’re still in the dog house, mister.”
“Can I come in?”
Tina wasn’t truly angry. She came from a family where you didn’t hide your anger, because by venting it you stole its power. That’s how the Crowes had always done it in Austin, and what was good enough for Texas was good enough for anywhere.
He found Stephanie in the living room, splayed on the floor with a pile of dolls, while on television cartoon animals got into trouble. “Hey, girl,” he told her. “Sorry I missed the show.”
She didn’t get up. “I’m used to it by now.”
She sounded more like her mother every day. When he leaned over and kissed her head, she wrinkled her nose.
“Dad, you stink.”
“I know, hon. Sorry.”
Tina threw a tube of moisturizing cream at Milo. “For that sunburn. Want a beer?”
“Any vodka?”
“Let’s get some food in you first.”
Tina boiled ramen noodles—one of the five things, by her own admission, that she knew how to cook—and brought out the bowl. By then, Stephanie had warmed to Milo’s presence and climbed up beside him on the sofa. She gave a rundown of the other performers at the talent show, their relative strengths and weaknesses, and the utter injustice of the winning performance—Sarah Lawton’s rendition of “I Decide.”
“But what about yours? We worked on it for weeks.”
Stephanie tilted her head forward to glower at him. “It was a stupid idea.”
“Why?”
“Because, Dad. No one understands French.”
Milo rubbed his forehead. He’d thought it was a fine idea, his child performing a Serge Gainsbourg hit. It was unexpected. Innovative. “I thought you liked that song.”
“Yeah.”
Tina took the far end of the couch. “She was incredible, Milo. Just stunning.”
“But I didn’t win.”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “One day you’ll be running the New York Philharmonic, and Sarah Lawton will be serving up fries at Fuddruckers.”
“Milo,” warned Tina.
“I’m just saying.”
A crooked smile filled Stephanie’s face as she gazed into the distance. “Yeah.”
Milo dug into his noodles. “We’ve got it on video, right?”
“Father couldn’t get it in focus. And I’m too small.” That was how Stephanie differentiated the men in her life: Patrick was Father; Milo was Dad.
“He told you he was sorry,” said Tina.
Stephanie, not in a forgiving mood, climbed to the floor to rejoin her dolls.
“So?” said Tina. “You going to tell me?”
“This is good,” Milo said through a mouthful of noodles.
“Where?”
“Where what?”
“Tom’s sending you off again. That’s why he called—to soften me up. He’s the least subtle CIA man I’ve ever met.”
“Now, wait—”
“Also,” she cut in, “I can see the guilt all over your face.”
Milo peered over his bowl at the television. The Road Runner was defying gravity once again, as Wile E. Coyote suffered the fate of the rest of us, the ones chained to the laws of physics. Quietly, he said, “I need to go to Paris. But I’ll be back by Saturday.”
“You don’t do that kind of work anymore.”
He didn’t answer. She was right, of course, but over the last year he’d disappeared on more and more “business trips,” and Tina’s worries had found voice. She knew enough about his life before they met to know that that man wasn’t the kind of husband she’d signed up for. She’d signed on with the person who’d left all of that behind.
“Why’s it so important you go to Paris? It’s not like the Company doesn’t have a whole army of goons to send.”
He lowered his voice: “It’s Angela Yates. She’s got herself in some real trouble.”
“Angela? From-our-wedding Angela?”
“They think she’s selling information.”
“Come on.” She made a face. “Angela’s the poster girl for Us-Against-Them. She’s more patriotic than John Wayne.”
“That’s why I need to go,” said Milo, looking up as Wile E. Coyote climbed out of a sooty hole after having plummeted a mile. “Those internal investigation guys—they won’t take that into consideration.”
“Okay. But you’re back by Saturday. We will fly to Disney World without you. Isn’t that right, Little Miss?”
“For sure,” Stephanie said to the television.
Milo held up his hands. “Promise.”
Tina rubbed his knee, and he pulled her close, smelling her freshly washed hair as he gazed at the television. That’s when he realized he’d been wrong: Wile E. Coyote wasn’t subject to the same laws of physics as the rest of us. Against all odds, he always survived.
Tina sniffed, then pushed him away. “Jesus, Milo. You stink.”
9 (#u091b7d02-b9dd-575e-8bcc-09ecba9ad902)
To visit the tower at the intersection of West Thirty-first and the Avenue of the Americas, you first had to know that you were being tracked by cameras that covered every inch of sidewalk and road around the building. So by the time you entered, you were expected, and Gloria Martinez, the dour forty-year-old Company desk clerk, was ready with your ID. Milo made a sport of flirting with Gloria, and she in turn made a sport of rebuffing him. She knew his wife was, as she put it, half-Latina, and because of this she occasionally thought it important to remind him, “Watch out, and keep sharp things away from your bed.”
Milo accepted this wisdom along with the breast-pocket ID, smiled for the camera attached to her terminal, and promised her, for the third time, “a secret vacation in Palm Springs.” In reply, she drew a cutting finger across her neck.
At the next stage of entry, by the six-pack of elevators, stood three enormous football players they called doormen. These men held the keys that allowed access to the four secret floors, stretching from nineteen to twenty-two, that constituted Tom Grainger’s domain. On this day, Lawrence, a tall, hairless black man, took him up. Even after five years of the same daily grind, Lawrence still waved a metal detector over Milo’s body in the elevator. It bleeped around his hip, and, like every day, Milo pulled out his keys, phone, and loose change for examination.
They passed the nineteenth floor, that eerily sterile interview level of narrow corridors and numbered doors where, when necessary, the Geneva Convention became a joke. The twentieth was empty, set aside for future expansion, and twenty-one contained the extensive library of printed Tourism files, a backup of the computer originals. The doors finally opened on the twenty-second floor.
Were a visitor to accidentally reach the Department of Tourism, he would find nothing out of the ordinary. It was an enormous open-plan office, stuffed with low-walled cubicles where pale Travel Agents hunched over computers, digging through mountains of information in order to write up their biweekly reports—or, in the vernacular, Tour Guides—for Tom Grainger. It had the feel, Milo always thought, of a Dickensian accounting office.
Before 9/11 and the collapse of the previous office at 7 World Trade Center, the Department of Tourism had been divided along geographic lines. Six sections devoted to six continents. Afterward, as this new office was put together and all the intelligence agencies were being scrutinized, Tourism rearranged itself along thematic lines. At present, there were seven sections. Milo’s section focused on terrorism and organized crime, and the many points at which they intersected.
Each section employed nine Travel Agents and one supervisor, giving the Avenue of the Americas (not counting an undisclosed number of Tourists spread around the globe) a staff of seventy-one, including its director, Tom Grainger.
One-quarter, Grainger had said. One-quarter of these people would have to go.
The old man was in a meeting with Terence Fitzhugh, Langley’s assistant director of clandestine operations, who sometimes arrived unexpectedly to address aspects of Grainger’s incompetence. While Milo waited outside the office, Harry Lynch, a twenty-something Travel Agent from Milo’s section, frog-marched a bundle of laser-printed sheets down the hall, stopping when he noticed Milo. “How’d it go?”
Milo blinked at him. “How’d what go?”
“Tennessee. I caught the radio traffic late Tuesday, and I knew—I knew—that this was our guy. It took a while to verify, but I had a feeling in my spine.”
Lynch felt a lot of things in his spine, a gift Milo was suspicious of. “Your backbone was right, Harry. Great job.”
Lynch glowed with pleasure and ran back to his cubicle.
Grainger’s door opened, and Fitzhugh stepped out. He towered over Grainger as he pointed at Milo with a manila envelope. “Weaver, right?” Milo admitted this was fact, and complimented his long memory—they hadn’t spoken in half a year, and then only briefly. In a show of comradely affection, Fitzhugh slapped Milo’s shoulder. “Too bad about the Tiger, but you just can’t predict these things, can you?”
Grainger, behind him, was noticeably silent.
“But we’re rid of one more terrorist,” Fitzhugh continued, stroking the thick silver hair above his ear. “That scores one for the good guys.”
Dutifully, Milo agreed with the sporting metaphor.
“So, what’s on your plate now?”
“Just Paris.”
“Paris?” Fitzhugh echoed, and Milo noticed a flicker of apprehension in his features. He turned to Grainger. “You got the budget to send this guy to Paris, Tom?”
“It’s Yates,” Grainger informed him.
“Yates?” Fitzhugh repeated again; perhaps he was hard of hearing.
“She’s one of his oldest friends. It’s the only sure way of pulling this off.”
“Gotcha,” Fitzhugh said, then patted Milo’s arm and walked away, singing, “Oo-la-la!”
“Get in here,” said Grainger.
The old man returned to his Aeron, settling against the bright backdrop of Manhattan, and placed an ankle on the corner of his broad desk. He did that a lot, as if to remind visitors whose office this really was.
“What did he want?” Milo asked as he took a seat.
“Like I told you, they’re reaming me over the budget, and then you go and mention Paris.”
“Sorry.”
Grainger waved the problem away. “One thing before we get into this. Your new friend, Simmons, has apparently done a rush-job autopsy on the Tiger. She wants to prove you killed him. You didn’t give her any reason to think that, did you?”
“I thought I was very cooperative. How did you hear about the autopsy?”
“Sal. Our friend at Homeland.”
Grainger wasn’t the only one with a friend in Homeland Security. Milo remembered the hubbub over the president’s announcement, nine days after the Towers, that he was establishing a new intelligence agency. The Company, the Feds, and the NSA lined up to squeeze in as many of their own employees as possible. “Sal” was Tourism’s plant, and periodically Grainger talked with him through an anonymous e-mail service called Nexcel. Milo had used it a few times himself.
“As you suspected,” Grainger continued, “it was cyanide. Hollow tooth. According to Homeland’s doctor, he only had a week or so left to him anyway. However, your prints are all over his face. Want to explain?”
“At the beginning of the interview, I attacked him.”
“Why?”
“I told you before—he brought up Tina and Stef.”
“You lost your cool.”
“I was short on sleep.”
“Okay.” Grainger reached out to tap the oak desktop, referring Milo to an unmarked gray file in the center. “Here’s the Angela thing. Go ahead.”
Milo had to get out of his chair to retrieve the dull-looking folder that showed off the newest Company security technique: Top secret files were now left unmarked, to better avoid attracting interest. He left it closed in his lap. “What about the Swiss clinic?”
Grainger pursed his wide lips. “As he said. Registered under Hamad al-Abari.”
“So you’ll put Tripplehorn on it?”
“We’ve only got eleven Tourists in Europe right now. Elliot died last week near Bern. The rest, including Tripplehorn, are all occupied.”
“Elliot? How?”
“Accident on the Autobahn. He’d been off the grid a week before we finally matched him up with the body.”
Because of security, Milo didn’t know any of the Tourists’ real names, their ages, or even what they looked like—only Grainger and a few others, including Fitzhugh, had that level of clearance. The news of Elliot’s death still bothered him. He scratched his ear, wondering about the man he only knew through a code name. How old was he? Did he have children? “You’re sure it was accidental?”
“Even if I wasn’t, I doubt we’d get the money for a proper investigation. That’s the level of purgatory we’ve entered.” When he saw the doubt in Milo’s face, his tone softened. “No, Milo. It was an accident. Head-on, and the other driver was killed, too.”
Milo finally opened the file. A couple of sheets of printed facts and a photograph—a mug shot of a fat Chinese man in a People’s Liberation Army colonel’s uniform.
“The Brits discovered it,” Grainger said. “Well, ‘discover’ is a strong word. They were lucky bastards. All routine, apparently. Six was keeping an eye on the opposition.”
In Milo’s experience, MI6 didn’t have the manpower to keep an eye on each foreign diplomat in the country, even ones as important as the one in this photo—Colonel Yi Lien—but he didn’t interrupt.
“The trip wasn’t strange. The colonel took the ferry over to France every weekend.”
“No Chunnel?”
“Fear of closed spaces—that’s in his file. So he does the ferry, then drives on to a little cottage he’s got in the Brittany countryside.”
“Bought under his name?”
Grainger reached for his computer’s mouse, but he was sitting too far back and had to drop his foot in order to reach it. “Of course not. Under a …” He clicked twice and squinted at the screen. “Yes. Renée Bernier. Twenty-six, from Paris.”
“Mistress.”
“Budding novelist, it says here.” Another click. “She uses the place to write, I suppose.”
“And meet with the colonel.”
“Everybody’s got to pay rent.”
“Walk me through this,” said Milo. “Colonel Yi Lien takes the ferry over to his French chalet. Spends the weekend with his girl. Then he boards the ferry. And drops dead?”
“Not dead. Heart attack.”
“And MI6 is there to resuscitate him.”
“Of course.”
“And they go through his bag.”
“What’s with the attitude, Milo?”
“Sorry, Tom. Go on.”
“Well, the colonel’s a paranoid sort. Doesn’t trust anyone in his own embassy, and for good reason. He’s sixty-four, unmarried, with a declining career. He knows that pretty soon someone’s going to suggest it’s time to pack up for Beijing, and he doesn’t want that. He likes London. He likes France.”
“And why wouldn’t he?”
“Right. But since he trusts no one, he keeps his laptop with him at all times. Big security risk. So our friends in MI6 took the opportunity, on the ferry, to copy his hard drive.”
“Very resourceful.”
“Aren’t they?” Grainger clicked his mouse again, and his printer, buried in the bookshelf alongside a row of untouched antiquarian books, hummed as it spat out a page.
“And Colonel Lien? What happened to him?”
“Irony of ironies. He was recalled to Beijing not long after the heart attack.”
Since Grainger wasn’t going anywhere, Milo retrieved the printout.
It was an interoffice memo from the U.S. embassy in Paris, top secret. A relay from the ambassador to Frank Barnes, the head of the Diplomatic Security Service in France, concerning new guidelines in dealing with the Chinese ambassador to France, who would temporarily be monitored by a three-man team.
“And Six just shared this with us for free?”
“They’re our special friends,” he said, smiling. “Actually, one of my personal special friends passed this on to me.”
“Does your special friend think Angela passed this on to Lien? Is that what Six thinks?”
“Calm down, Milo. All they did was pass on the memo. The rest, we figured out on our own.”
Like Tina, Milo still couldn’t believe that Angela Yates, “poster girl for Us-Against-Them,” would give away state secrets. “Has this been verified? The ferry; the heart attack?”
“Like I told you yesterday,” Grainger said with theatrical patience, “Yi Lien’s coronary made the British papers. It’s public record.”
Milo dropped the memo on Grainger’s desk. “So what’s the evidence?”
“That paper went through three sets of hands. The ambassador and Frank Barnes, of course. And the embassy’s chief of security. That would be Angela Yates. We’ve cleared Barnes, and I hope you won’t demand an exegesis of the ambassador.”
He’d already listened to this overview yesterday in Grainger’s car. But now, the physical reality of the memo was making him queasy.
“When was the last time you saw Yates?”
“About a year. But we’ve kept in touch.”
“So you’re still on good terms?”
Milo shrugged, then nodded.
“Good.” Grainger looked at his mouse—it was a bulbous thing with a blue-lit scroll wheel. “Did you and she ever …?”
“No.”
“Oh.” He sounded disappointed. “Doesn’t matter. I want you to give her this.” He opened a drawer and took out a black, thumb-sized flash drive, five hundred megabytes. It clattered on Milo’s side of the desk.
“What’s on it?”
“A mock-up report on Chinese oil concerns in Kazakhstan. The kind of thing they’ll want to see.”
“I don’t know, Tom. You may have cleared Barnes, but you still haven’t convinced me Angela’s to blame.”
“It’s not your job to be convinced,” Grainger told him. “You’ll find out more from your contact. Trust me, there is evidence.”
“But if Yi Lien’s gone, then …”
“Networks always survive recalls, Milo. You know that. What we don’t know is who’s at the top of the food chain now.”
Milo looked at Grainger’s hairless scalp, thinking this over. It was a simple enough matter, and he was glad to be brought in; he could at least make sure they dealt fairly with Angela. But the Company didn’t work like that—it didn’t buy international air tickets because it felt like being fair. He was being brought in because Angela trusted him. “How long will it take?”
“Oh, not long,” Grainger said, pleased the subject had changed. “You fly there, meet her, and hand over the drive. The story is that she’ll hold it for a contact named Jim Harrington who’ll arrive in Paris on Monday to pick it up. That’ll give her”—he raised his hands— “if, of course, it is her—only two days to copy it.”
“Is Harrington real?”
“He’s flying to Paris from Beirut. He knows what to do, but he doesn’t know why.”
“I see.”
“You’ll get it done in no time. Hop an evening flight and be back home by Saturday morning.”
“That’s encouraging.”
“Don’t be sarcastic.”
Milo knew why he was annoyed. It wasn’t that he’d missed his coffee that morning, nor that he was feeling an acute desire for a cigarette. It wasn’t even the miserable fact that he was preparing to set up a friend for treason—that only made him sick. He said, “When were you planning to tell me about the Tiger?”
Grainger, looking very innocent, said, “What about him?”
“That he was one of ours. That he was a Tourist.”
The old man’s expression lost its innocence. “You believe that?”
“I’ve spent the last six years tracking him. Don’t you think this piece of information might have helped?”
Grainger stared at him for about ten seconds, then rapped his knuckles on the desk. “Let’s talk when you get back. Okay? We don’t have time for it now.”
“The story’s really that long?”
“It is. Your plane leaves at five, and you need to type up some explanation of the Blackdale fiasco that doesn’t make us look like complete idiots. Also, put in all your receipts—I’m not paying for undocumented expenses anymore.”
Milo grunted an affirmative.
“I’ll tell James Einner to expect you. He’s your liaison in Paris.”
“Einner?” said Milo, suddenly awake. “You really think we need a Tourist for this?”
“Overkill never killed anyone,” Grainger said. “Now go. Everything’s been forwarded to your terminal.”
“And the Tiger?”
“As I said. When you get back.”
10 (#u091b7d02-b9dd-575e-8bcc-09ecba9ad902)
Milo had always felt comfortable in large airports. It wasn’t that he loved to fly—that, particularly after the Towers, had become an increasingly unbearable experience with its various secure levels of undress. The only things he enjoyed forty thousand feet above sea level were the cleverly packaged airline meals and the day’s music choices on his iPod.
Once he was on the ground again, though, in a properly designed airport, he always felt that he was wandering through a tiny city. Charles de Gaulle, for instance, was properly designed. Its striking sixties architecture—what designers in the sixties imagined a beautiful future would look like—made for a strangely nostalgic utopia of crowd control architecture and consumer pleasures, reinforced by the soft ding over loudspeakers followed by a lovely female voice listing the cities of the world.
Nostalgia was a good word for it, a false nostalgia for a time he was too young to know. It was why he loved Eurovision winners from 1965, the unreal Technicolor of those midcareer Bing Crosby films, and (despite his promises to the contrary) the perfect pair of a Davidoff cigarette and a bracing vodka, served at an airport bar.
He hadn’t wandered Charles de Gaulle in years, and he soon realized things had changed. He passed a McDonald’s and some bakeries, settling on the vaguely precious La Terrasse de Paris. There was no bar, instead a cafeteria-style area where he searched in vain for vodka. The only things available were small wines—red and white. Frustrated, he settled on four deciliters of some chilled mass-market Cabernet that cost nine euros. His plastic cup, the cashier told him, was complimentary.
Milo found an empty table by the rear wall, bumping into backs and luggage on the way, and settled down. Six in the morning, and the place was packed. His cell phone sang its irritating song, and it took him a moment to find the thing in his inner pocket. PRIVATE NUMBER. “Yeah?”
“Milo Weaver?” said a thin, wiry voice.
“Uh huh.”
“Einner. You landed all right?”
“Well, yes, I—”
“New York tells me you’ve got the package. Do you?”
“I hope so.”
“Answer yes or no, please.”
“Sure.”
“The subject takes lunch every day at twelve thirty precisely. I suggest you wait for her outside her place of work.”
Feeling more desperate for his nostalgic interlude, Milo looked for an ashtray; there was none. He tapped out a Tennessee-bought Davidoff, deciding to ash into the cup and drink the wine from the bottle. “That’ll give me time to nap. It was a long flight.”
“Oh, right,” said Einner. “I forgot how old you are.”
Milo was too stunned to say what his mind muttered: I’m onlythirty-seven.
“Don’t worry, Weaver. We’ll have you out of here in time for your vacation. I don’t even know why they bothered flying you in.”
“We done?”
“I understand the subject is an old friend of yours.”
“Yes.” Milo took a drag, losing his grip on his sense of humor, while someone nearby coughed loudly.
“Don’t let that get in the way.”
Milo suppressed the urge to shout a reply. Instead, he hung up as, a few seats away, a young man started a coughing fit into his hand, glaring at him.
Milo suddenly realized why. Round eyes watched him tap ash into his plastic cup, and he waited for the hammer to fall. It was swift—the cashier, having noticed the crime in action, called over a stock boy who had been crouched by the canned coffee mixtures, and he followed her pointed finger to Milo’s corner. The boy, eighteen or so, wiped his hands on his orange apron as he weaved expertly between tables toward him. “Monsieur, ici vous ne pouvez pas fumer.”
Milo considered standing his ground, then noticed the big sign with the symbol for no smoking on the wall, a few feet from him. He raised his hands, smiling, took one last drag, and dropped the cigarette into the plastic cup. He poured in some of the wretched wine to extinguish it. The stock boy, behind a bashful grin, was relieved not to have to throw this man out.
Grainger had booked him into the Hotel Bradford Elysées, one of those classical, overpriced monstrosities along the Rue Saint-Philippe du Roule that, were anyone to ever audit the books of the Department of Tourism, would be the first thing to go. He asked the front desk for a wake-up call at eleven thirty—about four hours from then—and picked up a Herald Tribune. In the ornate Bradford Elysées elevator, he read headlines. They weren’t pretty.
More car bombs in Iraq, killing eight U.S. and Canadian soldiers, and more riots in Khartoum, Sudan: a photo of a full square of angry men—thousands—waving placard photographs of the dead Mullah Salih Ahmad, a white-bearded holy man with a white taqiyah covering his bald scalp. Other signs in Arabic, the caption told him, called for the head of President Omar al-Bashir. On page eight, he found a single-paragraph story saying that Homeland Security had apprehended a suspected political assassin, whom they refused to name.
Yet the most important news was unwritten: Milo Weaver had arrived in Paris to set up one of his oldest friends.
Mawkishly, he remembered when both of them were young field agents in London. Lots of codes and clandestine meetings in out-of-the-way pubs and arguments with British intelligence about the mess their countries were just starting to make of the postcommunist world. Angela was smart and stable—a near-contradiction in their business—and she had a sense of humor. In intelligence, those three things together are so rare that when you find them, you don’t let go. Given the amount of time they spent together, everyone assumed they were a couple. This served them both. It kept her homosexuality out of conversations, and saved Milo from diplomats’ wives setting him up with their nieces.
For two months after the Venice fiasco, Angela couldn’t speak to him—that’s how much killing her boss, Frank Dawdle, had disturbed her. But the next year, when Milo became simultaneously a husband and a dad to a baby girl, Angela came to the wedding in Texas and showered happy praise on Tina. They had remained in touch, and when Angela came to town Tina always insisted they take her out to dinner.
He lay on the hotel bed without undressing and considered calling Tom. What to say? He’d already argued Angela’s innocence. Should he report that James Einner was a dunce, unequipped to handle the operation? Tom didn’t care what Milo thought of Einner.
The truth—and for a moment it disturbed him—was that, six years ago, as a Tourist, he never would have questioned any of this. The job would have been simple and clean. But he wasn’t a Tourist anymore, and for that he had no regrets.
11 (#u091b7d02-b9dd-575e-8bcc-09ecba9ad902)
The American embassy was separated from the Champs-Elysées by the long, rigorous Jardin des Champs-Elysées. He parked along Avenue Franklin D. Roosevelt and walked the length of the park, passing old Parisians on benches with bags of bread crumbs dangling between their knees, luring pigeons, while the midday sun burned hot and moist.
Paris in July is a bleak place to be. The locals have started to flee on their welfare-state vacations, and in their place Japanese, Dutch, Americans, Germans, and Brits stand in lines leading to ticket counters, their necks craned, waving brochures at perspiring cheeks, shouting at errant children. The elderly tourists move in packs, clutching walkers or fooling with wheelchairs, while the young stop periodically to bitch about the hard sidewalks and whisper, surprised, about how many black people there are in Paris.
Most of them, just before leaving home, watched Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron dance through white-bread streets and are shocked by today’s rues and avenues. Instead of fat old men with mustaches offering slices of cheese with aperitifs, they’re faced with white boys in dirty dreadlocks playing movie sound tracks on beat-up guitars, suspiciously pushy Africans selling miniature Eiffel Towers and models of the Louvre pyramid, and hordes of tourists like themselves, guided by stern elderly French women waving colored flags to keep them on track.
Of course, there was plenty of beauty in Paris, but, given his reason for being there, Milo could hardly see it.
He found a bench at the Place de la Concorde end of the park, facing tree-lined Avenue Gabriel and the embassy at number 2. He gave a smile to the old woman beside him on the bench, surrounded by pigeons. She returned his smile and tossed crumbs at the birds. It was only twelve ten, so he searched his pockets for cigarettes before guilt overwhelmed him and he let them be. He crossed his arms over his chest and stared at the white wedding-cake building with three uniformed marines in its yard wearing automatic rifles.
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Olen Steinhauer
Superb new CIA thriller featuring black ops expert Milo Weaver and acclaimed by Lee Child as ‘first class – the kind of thing John le Carre might have written’In the global age of the CIA, wherever there's trouble, there's a Tourist: the men and women who do the dirty work. They're the Company's best agents – and Milo Weaver was the best of them all.Following a near-lethal encounter with foreign hitman the 'Tiger', a burnt-out Milo decides to continue his work from behind a desk. Four years later, he's no closer to finding the Tiger than he was before. When the elusive assassin unexpectedly gives himself up to Milo, it's because he wants something in return: revenge.Once a Tourist, always a Tourist – soon Milo is back in the field, tracking down the Tiger's handler in a world of betrayal, skewed politics and extreme violence. It's a world he knows well but he's about to learn the toughest lesson of all: trust no one.
The TOURIST
OLEN STEINHAUER
Copyright (#u091b7d02-b9dd-575e-8bcc-09ecba9ad902)
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2009
Copyright © Olen Steinhauer 2007
Olen Steinhauer asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication
Source ISBN: 9780007296774
Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2009 ISBN: 9780007310111
Version: 2017-10-18
Dedication (#u091b7d02-b9dd-575e-8bcc-09ecba9ad902)
For
MARGO
Contents
Cover (#u8adac187-1ecd-54e5-a008-5bfd11a28a1b)
Title Page (#ud68e2918-62ae-59e9-94eb-3bdeadd3c643)
Copyright (#u90de6523-3aae-547a-8ede-43fb595c46f7)
Dedication (#ub8bd8866-30ee-5df2-a281-268734b115b0)
The End Of Tourism (#uf82bd398-008f-524e-b307-4178bbd9a977)
Chapter One (#uf12e4425-6515-5c13-935d-abdb7fbdb29a)
Chapter Two (#u43f5e015-4920-50dd-8cd1-4b9da3cc6b64)
Chapter Three (#u3a0857ac-e1ab-545c-a8cf-3d8e9211f2da)
Chapter Four (#u58c0d4ea-92b2-54d1-a1b6-51bb465b91a2)
Chapter Five (#u43abeee7-f92f-5c10-b053-f0fa08db6ca7)
Chapter Six (#u1fcc99c6-7a99-57f4-8c08-8f7b076684d2)
Part One: Problems Of The International Tourist Trade (#uec6d4167-44d1-5ab6-9ffe-32c9962585f0)
Chapter One (#u4833aff5-9219-5a23-9ea1-4d95d46f3cf5)
Chapter Two (#u2b48ec10-c56c-5911-9f3d-5c789d47c435)
Chapter Three (#u1183ce19-ff10-5f5d-801c-8ddc710a88b5)
Chapter Four (#u990b8f02-694b-5af3-abb4-e2b8a02b530d)
Chapter Five (#uc76f2934-b904-5744-8660-ba71869a557a)
Chapter Six (#ubca09e77-603f-534c-8351-972643bcc320)
Chapter Seven (#u4591906c-17c8-546f-be58-78b09a3ca042)
Chapter Eight (#u59715ec3-6177-5577-b28b-2b712c9359fe)
Chapter Nine (#uf87c91fa-2e9d-5b9d-a747-6e73f4f2383d)
Chapter Ten (#ubac1ac41-0d9b-54d5-9ba5-8bcc3b4f4b67)
Chapter Eleven (#u53e8ecd6-8a73-5da7-a3b4-e84f818cc819)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Two: Tourism Is Storytelling (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
The Beginning Of Tourism (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author
Also By Olen Steinhauer (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
(#u091b7d02-b9dd-575e-8bcc-09ecba9ad902)
The END of TOURISM (#u091b7d02-b9dd-575e-8bcc-09ecba9ad902)
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, TO
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2001
1 (#u091b7d02-b9dd-575e-8bcc-09ecba9ad902)
Four hours after his failed suicide attempt, he descended toward Aerodrom Ljubljana. A tone sounded, and above his head the seat belt sign glowed. Beside him, a Swiss businesswoman buckled her belt and gazed out the window at the clear Slovenian sky—all it had taken was one initial rebuff to convince her that the twitching American she’d been seated next to had no interest in conversation.
The American closed his eyes, thinking about the morning’s failure in Amsterdam—gunfire, shattering glass and splintered wood, sirens.
If suicide is sin, he thought, then what is it to someone who doesn’t believe in sin? What is it then? An abomination of nature? Probably, because the one immutable law of nature is to continue existing. Witness: weeds, cockroaches, ants, and pigeons. All of nature’s creatures work to a single, unified purpose: to stay alive. It’s the one indisputable theory of everything.
He’d dwelled on suicide so much over the last months, had examined the act from so many angles, that it had lost its punch. The infinitive clause “to commit suicide” was no more tragic than “to eat breakfast” or “to sit,” and the desire to snuff himself was often as strong as his desire “to sleep.”
Sometimes it was a passive urge—drive recklessly without a seat belt; walk blindly into a busy street—though more frequently these days he was urged to take responsibility for his own death. “The Bigger Voice,” his mother would have called it: There’s the knife; youknow what to do. Open the window and tryto fly. At four thirty that morning, while he lay on top of a woman in Amsterdam, pressing her to the floor as her bedroom window exploded from automatic gunfire, the urge had suggested he stand straight and proud and face the hail of bullets like a man.
He’d spent the whole week in Holland, watching over a sixty-year-old U.S.-supported politician whose comments on immigration had put a contract on her head. The hired assassin, a killer who in certain circles was known only as “the Tiger,” had that morning made a third attempt on her life. Had he succeeded, he would have derailed that day’s Dutch House of Representatives vote on her conservative immigration bill.
How the continued existence of one politician—in this case, a woman who had made a career of catering to the whims of frightened farmers and bitter racists—played into the hands of his own country was unknown to him. “Keeping an empire,” Grainger liked to tell him, “is ten times more difficult than gaining one.”
Rationales, in his trade, didn’t matter. Action was its own reason. But, covered in glass shards, the woman under him screaming over the crackling sound, like a deep fryer, of the window frame splintering, he’d thought, What am I doing here? He even placed a hand flat on the wood-chip-covered carpet and began to push himself up again, to face this assassin head-on. Then, in the midst of all that noise, he heard the happy music of his cell phone. He removed his hand from the floor, saw that it was Grainger calling, and shouted into it, “What?”
“Riverrun, past Eve,” Tom Grainger said.
“And Adam’s.”
Learned Grainger had created go-codes out of the first lines of novels. His own Joycean code told him he was needed someplace new. But nothing was new anymore. The unrelenting roll call of cities and hotel rooms and suspicious faces that had constituted his life for too many years was stupefying in its tedium. Would it never stop?
So he hung up on his boss, told the screaming woman to stay where she was, and climbed to his feet … but didn’t die. The bullets had ceased, replaced by the whining sirens of Amsterdam’s finest.
“Slovenia,” Grainger told him later, as he drove the politician safely to the Tweede Kamer. “Portorož, on the coast. We’ve got a vanished suitcase of taxpayer money and a missing station chief. Frank Dawdle.”
“I need a break, Tom.”
“It’ll be like a vacation. Angela Yates is your contact—she works out of Dawdle’s office. A familiar face. Afterward, stay around and enjoy the water.”
As Grainger droned on, outlining the job with minimal details, his stomach had started to hurt, as it still did now, a sharp pain.
If the one immutable law of existence is to exist, then does that make the opposite some sort of crime?
No. Suicide-as-crime would require that nature recognize good and evil. Nature only recognizes balance and imbalance.
Maybe that was the crucial point—balance. He’d slipped to some secluded corner of the extremes, some far reach of utter imbalance. He was a ludicrously unbalanced creature. How could nature smile upon him? Nature, surely, wanted him dead, too.
“Sir?” said a bleached, smiling stewardess. “Your seat belt.”
He blinked at her, confused. “What about it?”
“You need to wear it. We’re landing. It’s for your safety.”
Though he wanted to laugh, he buckled it just for her. Then he reached into his jacket pocket, took out a small white envelope full of pills he’d bought in Düsseldorf, and popped two Dexedrine. To live or die was one issue; for the moment, he just wanted to stay alert.
Suspiciously, the Swiss businesswoman watched him put away his drugs.
The pretty, round-faced brunette behind the scratched bulletproof window watched him approach. He imagined he knew what she noticed—how big his hands were, for example. Piano-player hands. The Dexedrine was making them tremble, just slightly, and if she noticed it she might wonder if he was unconsciously playing a sonata.
He handed over a mangled American passport that had crossed more borders than many diplomats. A touring pianist, she might think. A little pale, damp from the long flight he’d just finished. Bloodshot eyes. Aviatophobia—fear of flying—was probably her suspicion.
He managed a smile, which helped wash away her expression of bureaucratic boredom. She really was very pretty, and he wanted her to know, by his expression, that her face was a nice Slovenian welcome.
The passport gave her his particulars: five foot eleven. Born June 1970—thirty-one years old. Piano player? No—American passports don’t list occupations. She peered up at him and spoke in her unsure accent: “Mr. Charles Alexander?”
He caught himself looking around again, paranoid, and gave another smile. “That’s right.”
“You are here for the business or the tourism?”
“I’m a tourist.”
She held the open passport under a black light, then raised a stamp over one of the few blank pages. “How long will you be in Slovenia?”
Mr. Charles Alexander’s green eyes settled pleasantly on her. “Four days.”
“For vacation? You should spend at least a week. There is many things to see.”
His smile flashed again, and he rocked his head. “Well, maybe you’re right. I’ll see how it goes.”
Satisfied, the clerk pressed the stamp onto the page and handed it back. “Enjoy Slovenia.”
He passed through the luggage area, where other passengers from the Amsterdam-Ljubljana flight leaned on empty carts around the still-barren carousel. None seemed to notice him, so he tried to stop looking like a paranoid drug mule. It was his stomach, he knew, and that initial Dexedrine rush. Two white customs desks sat empty of officials, and he continued through a pair of mirrored doors that opened automatically for him. A crowd of expectant faces sank when they realized he didn’t belong to them. He loosened his tie.
The last time Charles Alexander had been in Slovenia, years ago, he’d been called something else, a name just as false as the one he used now. Back then, the country was still exhilarated by the 1991 ten-day war that had freed it from the Yugoslav Federation. Nestled against Austria, Slovenia had always been the odd man out in that patchwork nation, more German than Balkan. The rest of Yugoslavia accused Slovenes—not without reason—of snobbery.
Still inside the airport, he spotted Angela Yates just outside the doors to the busy arrivals curb. Above business slacks, she wore a blue Viennese blazer, arms crossed over her breasts as she smoked and stared through the gray morning light at the field of parked cars in front of the airport. He didn’t approach her. Instead, he found a bathroom and checked himself in the mirror. The paleness and sweat had nothing to do with aviatophobia. He ripped off his tie, splashed water on his cheeks, wiped at the pink edges of his eyes and blinked, but still looked the same.
“Sorry to get you up,” he said once he’d gotten outside.
Angela jerked, a look of terror passing through her lavender eyes. Then she grinned. She looked tired, but she would be. She’d driven four hours to meet his flight, which meant she’d had to leave Vienna by 5:00 a.m. She tossed the unfinished smoke, a Davidoff, then punched his shoulder and hugged him. The smell of tobacco was comforting. She held him at arm’s length. “You haven’t been eating.”
“Overrated.”
“And you look like hell.”
He shrugged as she yawned into the back of her hand.
“You going to make it?” he asked.
“No sleep last night.”
“Need something?”
Angela got rid of the smile. “Still gulping amphetamines?”
“Only for emergencies,” he lied, because he’d taken that last dose for no other reason than he’d wanted it, and now, as the tremors shook through his bloodstream, he had an urge to empty the rest down his throat. “Want one?”
“Please.”
They crossed an access road choked with morning taxis and buses heading into town, then followed concrete steps down to the parking lot. She whispered, “Is it Charles these days?”
“Almost two years now.”
“Well, it’s a stupid name. Too aristocratic. I refuse to use it.”
“I keep asking for a new one. A month ago I showed up in Nice, and some Russian had already heard about Charles Alexander.”
“Oh?”
“Nearly killed me, that Russian.”
She smiled as if he’d been joking, but he hadn’t been. Then his snapping synapses worried he was sharing too much. Angela knew nothing about his job; she wasn’t supposed to.
“Tell me about Dawdle. How long have you worked with him?”
“Three years.” She took out her key ring and pressed a little black button until she spotted, three rows away, a gray Peugeot winking at them. “Frank’s my boss, but we keep it casual. Just a small Company presence at the embassy.” She paused. “He was sweet on me for a while. Can you imagine? Couldn’t see what was right in front of him.”
She spoke with a tinge of hysteria that made him fear she would cry. He pushed anyway. “What do you think? Could he have done it?”
Angela popped the Peugeot’s trunk. “Absolutely not. Frank Dawdle wasn’t dishonest. Bit of a coward, maybe. A bad dresser. But never dishonest. He didn’t take the money.”
Charles threw in his bag. “You’re using the past tense, Angela.”
“I’m just afraid.”
“Of what?”
Angela knitted her brows, irritated. “That he’s dead. What do you think?”
2 (#u091b7d02-b9dd-575e-8bcc-09ecba9ad902)
She was a careful driver these days, which he supposed was an inevitable result of her two Austrian years. Had she been stationed in Italy, or even here in Slovenia, she would’ve ignored her turn signals and those pesky speed limit notices.
To ease the tension, he brought up old London friends from when they both worked out of that embassy as vaguely titled “attachés.” He’d left in a hurry, and all Angela knew was that his new job, with some undisclosed Company department, required a steady change of names, and that he once again worked under their old boss, Tom Grainger. The rest of London station believed what they’d been told—that he had been fired. She said, “I fly up for parties now and then. They always invite me. But they’re sad, you know? All diplomatic people. There’s something intensely pitiful about them.”
“Really?” he said, though he knew what she meant.
“Like they’re living in their own little compound, surrounded by barbed wire. They pretend they’re keeping everyone out, when in fact they’re locked in.”
It was a nice way to put it, and it made him think of Tom Grainger’s delusions of empire—Roman outposts in hostile lands.
Once they hit the A1 heading southwest, Angela got back to business. “Tom fill you in on everything?”
“Not much. Can I get one of those smokes?”
“Not in the car.”
“Oh.”
“Tell me what you know, and I’ll fill in the rest.”
Thick forests passed them, pines flickering by as he outlined his brief conversation with Grainger. “He says your Frank Dawdle was sent down here to deliver a briefcase full of money. He didn’t say how much.”
“Three million.”
“Dollars?”
She nodded at the road.
Charles continued: “He was last seen at the Hotel Metropol in Portorož by Slovenian intelligence. In his room. Then he disappeared.” He waited for her to fill the numerous blank spots in that story line. All she did was drive in her steady, safe way. “Want to tell me more? Like, who the money was for?”
Angela tilted her head from side to side, but instead of answering she turned on the radio. It was preset to a station she’d found during her long drive from Vienna. Slovenian pop. Terrible stuff.
“And maybe you can tell me why we had to learn his last whereabouts from the SOVA, and not from our own people.”
As if he’d said nothing, she cranked the volume, and boy-band harmonies filled the car. Finally, she started to speak, and Charles had to lean close, over the stick shift, to hear.
“I’m not sure who the orders started with, but they reached us through New York. Tom’s office. He chose Frank for obvious reasons. Old-timer with a spotless record. No signs of ambition. No drinking problems, nothing to be compromised. He was someone they could trust with three million. More importantly, he’s familiar here. If the Slovenes saw him floating around the resort, there’d be no suspicions. He vacations in Portorož every summer, speaks fluent Slovene.” She grunted a half-laugh. “He even stopped to chat with them. Did Tom tell you that? The day he arrived, he saw a SOVA agent in a gift shop and bought him a little toy sailboat. Frank’s like that.”
“I like his style.”
Angela’s look suggested he was being inappropriately ironic. “It was supposed to be simple as pie. Frank takes the money down to the harbor on Saturday—two days ago—and does a straight phrase-code pass-off. Just hands over the briefcase. In return, he gets an address. He goes to a pay phone, calls me in Vienna, and reads off the address. Then he drives back home.”
The song ended, and a young DJ shouted in Slovenian about the hot-hot-hot band he’d just played as he mixed in the intro to the next tune, a sugar-sweet ballad.
“Why wasn’t someone backing him up?”
“Someone was,” she said, spying the rearview. “Leo Bernard. You met him in Munich, remember? Couple of years ago.”
Charles remembered a hulk of a man from Pennsylvania. In Munich, Leo had been their tough-guy backup during an operation with the German BND against an Egyptian heroin racket. They’d never had to put Leo’s fighting skills to the test, but it had given Charles a measure of comfort knowing the big man was available. “Yeah. Leo was funny.”
“Well, he’s dead,” said Angela, again glancing into the rearview. “In his hotel room, a floor above Frank’s. Nine millimeter.” She swallowed. “From his own gun, we think, though we can’t find the weapon itself.”
“Anyone hear it?”
She shook her head. “Leo had a suppressor.”
Charles leaned back into his seat, involuntarily checking the side mirror. He lowered the volume as a woman tried with limited success to carry a high E-note. Then he cut it off. Angela was being cagey about the central facts of this case—the why of all that money—but that could wait. Right now he wanted to visualize the events. “When did they arrive at the coast?”
“Friday afternoon. The seventh.”
“Legends?”
“Frank, no. He was too well known for that. Leo used an old one, Benjamin Schneider, Austrian.”
“Next day, Saturday, was the trade. Which part of the docks?”
“I’ve got it written down.”
“Time?”
“Evening. Seven.”
“Frank disappears …?”
“Last seen at 4:00 A.M. Saturday morning. He was up until then drinking with Bogdan Krizan, the local SOVA head. They’re old friends. Then, around two in the afternoon, the hotel cleaning staff found Leo’s body.”
“What about the dock? Anyone see what happened at seven?”
Again, she glanced into the rearview. “We were too late. The Slovenes weren’t going to ask us why Frank was buying them toys. And we didn’t know about Leo’s body until after seven. His papers were good enough to confuse the Austrian embassy for over eight hours.”
“For three million dollars you couldn’t have sent a couple more watchers?”
Angela tightened her jaw. “Maybe, but hindsight doesn’t do us any good now.”
The incompetence surprised Charles; then again, it didn’t. “Whose call was it?”
When she looked in the mirror yet again, her jaw was tighter, her cheeks flushed. So it was her fault, he thought, but she said, “Frank wanted me to stay in Vienna.”
“It was Frank Dawdle’s idea to go off with three million dollars and only one watcher?”
“I know the man. You don’t.”
She’d said those words without moving her lips. Charles felt the urge to tell her that he did know her boss. He’d worked with him once, in 1996, to get rid of a retired communist spy from some nondescript Eastern European country. But she wasn’t supposed to know about that. He touched her shoulder to show a little sympathy. “I won’t talk to Tom until we’ve got some real answers. Okay?”
She finally looked at him with a weary smile. “Thanks, Milo.”
“It’s Charles.”
The smile turned sardonic. “I wonder if you even have a real name.”
3 (#u091b7d02-b9dd-575e-8bcc-09ecba9ad902)
Their hour-long drive skirted the Italian border, and as they neared the coast the highway opened up and the foliage thinned. The warm morning sun glinted off the road as they passed Koper and Izola, and Charles watched the low shrubs, the Mediterranean architecture, and the ZIMMER-FREI signs that littered each turnoff. It reminded him just how beautiful this tiny stretch of coast truly was. Less than thirty miles that had been pulled back and forth between Italians, Yugoslavs, and Slovenes over centuries of regional warfare.
To their right, they caught occasional glimpses of the Adriatic, and through the open window he smelled salt. He wondered if his own salvation lay in something like this. Disappear, and spend the rest of his years under a hot sun on the sea. The kind of climate that dries and burns the imbalance out of you. But he pushed that aside, because he already knew the truth: Geography solves nothing.
He said, “We can’t do this unless you tell me the rest.”
“What rest?” She spoke as if she had no idea.
“The why. Why Frank Dawdle was sent down here with three million dollars.”
To the rearview, she said, “War criminal. Bosnian Serb. Big fish.”
A small pink hotel passed, and then Portorož Bay opened up, full of sun and glimmering water. “Which one?”
“Does it really matter?”
He supposed it didn’t. Karadžić, Mladić, or any other wanted ić—the story was always the same. They, as well as the Croat zealots on the other side of the battle lines, had all had a hand in the Bosnian genocides that had helped turn a once-adored multiethnic country into an international pariah. Since 1996, these men had been fugitives, hidden by sympathizers and corrupt officials, faced with charges from the UN’s International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. Crimes against humanity, crimes against life and health, genocide, breaches of the Geneva conventions, murder, plunder, and violations of the laws and customs of war. Charles gazed at the Adriatic, sniffing the wind. “The UN’s offering five million for these people.”
“Oh, this guy wanted five,” Angela said as she slowed behind a line of cars with Slovenian, German, and Italian plates. “But all he had was an address, and he demanded the money up front so he could disappear. The UN didn’t trust him, turned him down flat, so some smart young man at Langley decided we should purchase it ourselves for three. A PR coup. We buy ourselves the glory of an arrest and once again point out the UN’s incompetence.” She shrugged. “Five or three—either way, you’re a millionaire.”
“What do we know about him?”
“He wouldn’t tell us anything, but Langley figured it out. Dušan Masković, a Sarajevo Serb who joined the militias in the early days. He’s part of the entourage that’s been hiding the big ones in the Republika Srpska hills. Two weeks ago, he left their employ and contacted the UN Human Rights office in Sarajevo. Apparently, they get people like him every day. So little Dušan put in a call to our embassy in Vienna and found a sympathetic ear.”
“Why not just take care of it there? In Sarajevo?”
The traffic moved steadily forward, and they passed shops with flowers and international newspapers. “He didn’t want to collect in Bosnia. Didn’t even want it set up through the Sarajevo embassy. And he didn’t want anyone stationed in the ex-Yugoslav republics involved.”
“He’s no fool.”
“From what we figure, he got hold of a boat in Croatia and was going to wait in the Adriatic until 7:00 P.M. on Saturday. Then he could slip in, make the trade, and slip out again before he’d have to register with the harbormaster.”
“I see,” Charles said, because despite his returning stomach cramps he finally had enough information to picture the various players and the ways they connected.
“Want me to take care of the room?”
“Let’s check the dock first.”
Portorož’s main harbor lay at the midpoint of the bay; behind it sat the sixties architecture of the Hotel Slovenia, its name written in light blue against white concrete, a surf motif. They parked off the main road and wandered around shops selling model sailboats and T-shirts with PORTOROž and I LOVE SLOVENIA and MY PARENTS WENT TO SLOVENIA AND ALL I GOT … scribbled across them. Sandaled families sucking ice cream cones and cigarettes wandered leisurely past. Behind the shops lay a row of small piers full of vacation boats.
“Which one?” asked Charles.
“Forty-seven.”
He led the way, hands in his pockets, as if he and his lady-friend were enjoying the view and the hot sun. The crews and captains on the motor-and sailboats paid them no attention. It was nearly noon, time for siestas and drink. Germans and Slovenes dozed on their hot decks, and the only voices they heard were from children who couldn’t fall asleep.
Forty-seven was empty, but at forty-nine a humble yacht with an Italian flag was tied up. On its deck, a heavy woman was trying to peel a sausage.
“Buon giorno!” said Charles.
The woman inclined her head politely.
Charles’s Italian was only passable, so he asked Angela to find out when the woman had arrived in Portorož. Angela launched into a machine-gun Roman-Italian that sounded like a blast of insults, but the sausage woman smiled and waved her hands as she threw the insults back. It ended with Angela waving a “Grazie mille.”
Charles waved, too, then leaned close to Angela as they walked away. “Well?”
“She got here Saturday night. There was a motorboat beside theirs—dirty, she tells me—but it left soon after they arrived. She guesses around seven thirty, eight.”
After a couple more steps, Angela realized Charles had stopped somewhere behind her. His hands were on his hips as he stared at the empty spot with a small placard marked “47.” “How clean do you think that water is?”
“I’ve seen worse.”
Charles handed over his jacket, then unbuttoned his shirt as he kicked off his shoes.
“You’re not,” said Angela.
“If the trade happened at all, then it probably didn’t go well. If it led to a fight, something might have dropped in here.”
“Or,” said Angela, “if Dušan’s smart, he took Frank’s body out into the Adriatic and dropped him overboard.”
Charles wanted to tell her that he’d already ruled Dušan Masković out as a murderer—there was nothing for Dušan to gain by killing a man who was going to give him money for a simple address with no questions asked—but changed his mind. He didn’t have time for a fight.
He stripped to his boxers, hiding the pangs in his stomach as he bent to pull off the slacks. He wore no undershirt, and his chest was pale from a week spent under Amsterdam’s gray skies. “If I don’t come up …”
“Don’t look at me,” said Angela. “I can’t swim.”
“Then get Signora Sausage to come for me.”
Before she could think of a reply, Charles had jumped feet-first into the shallow bay. It was a shock to his drug-bubbly nerves, and there was an instant when he almost breathed in; he had to force himself not to. He paddled back to the surface and wiped his face. Angela, on the edge of the pier, smiled down at him. “Done already?”
“Don’t wrinkle my shirt.” He submerged again, then opened his eyes.
With the sun almost directly above, the shadows beneath the water were stark. He saw the dirty white hulls of boats, then the blackness where their undersides curved into darkness. He ran his hands along the Italian boat at number forty-nine, following its lines toward the bow, where a thick cord ran up to the piles, holding the boat secure. He let go of the line and sank into the heavy darkness under the pier, using hands for sight. He touched living things— a rough shell, slime, the scales of a paddling fish—but as he prepared to return to the surface, he found something else. A heavy work boot, hard-soled. It was attached to a foot, jeans, a body. Again, he fought to keep himself from inhaling. He tugged, but the stiff, cold corpse was hard to move.
He came up for air, ignored Angela’s taunts, then submerged again. He used the pilings for leverage. Once he’d dragged the body into the partial light around the Italian boat, through the cloud of kicked sand, he saw why it had been such a struggle. The bloated body—a dark-bearded man—was rope-bound at the waist to a length of heavy metal tubing: a piece of an engine, he guessed.
He broke the surface gasping. This water, which had seemed so clean a minute before, was now filthy. He spat out leakage, wiping his lips with the back of his hand. Above him, hands on her knees, Angela said, “I can hold my breath longer than that. Watch.”
“Help me up.”
She set his clothes in a pile, kneeled on the pier, and reached down to him. Soon he was over the edge, sitting with his knees up, dripping. A breeze set him shivering.
“Well?” said Angela.
“What does Frank look like?”
She reached into her blazer and tugged out a small photograph she’d brought to show to strangers. A frontal portrait, morose but efficiently lit, so that all Frank Dawdle’s features were visible. A clean-shaven man, bald on top, white hair over the ears, sixty or so.
“He didn’t grow a beard since this, did he?”
Angela shook her head, then looked worried. “But the last known photo of Masković …”
He got to his feet. “Unless the Portorož murder rate has gone wild, that’s your Serb down there.”
“I don’t—”
Charles cut her off before she could argue: “We’ll talk with the SOVA, but you need to call Vienna. Now. Check Frank’s office. See what’s missing. Find out what was on his computer before he left.”
He slipped into his shirt, his wet body bleeding the white cotton gray. Angela started fooling with her phone, but her fingers had trouble with the buttons. Charles took her hands in his and looked into her eyes.
“This is serious. Okay? But don’t freak out until we know everything. And let’s not tell the Slovenes about the body. We don’t want them holding us for questioning.”
Again, she nodded.
Charles let go of her and grabbed his jacket, pants, and shoes, then began walking back up the pier, toward the shore. From her boat, her chubby knees to her chin, the Italian woman let out a low whistle. “Bello,” she said.
4 (#u091b7d02-b9dd-575e-8bcc-09ecba9ad902)
An hour and a half later, they were preparing to leave again. Charles wanted to drive, but Angela put up a fight. It was the shock—without him having to say a word, she’d put it together herself. Frank Dawdle, her beloved boss, had killed Leo Bernard, killed Dušan Masković, and walked off with three million dollars of the U.S. government’s money.
The most damning piece of evidence came from her call to Vienna. The hard drive of Dawdle’s computer was missing. Based on power usage, the in-house computer expert believed it had been removed sometime Friday morning, just before Frank and Leo departed for Slovenia.
Despite this, she clung to a new, hopeful theory: The Slovenes were responsible. Frank might have taken his hard drive, but he would only have done so under coercion. His old SOVA buddies were threatening him. When they met with Bogdan Krizan, the local SOVA head, she glared across the Hotel Slovenia table while the old man gobbled a plate of fried calamari and explained that he’d spent Friday night with Frank Dawdle, drinking in his room.
“What do you mean—you visited him?” she said. “Didn’t you have work to do?”
Krizan paused over his food, holding his fork loosely. He had an angular face that seemed to expand when he shrugged in his exaggerated Balkan manner. “We’re old friends, Miss Yates. Old spies. Drinking together until the early morning is what we do. Besides, I’d heard about Charlotte. I offered sympathy in a bottle.”
“Charlotte?” asked Charles.
“His wife,” Krizan said, then corrected: “Ex-wife.”
Angela nodded. “She left him about six months ago. He took it pretty hard.”
“Tragic,” said Krizan.
To Charles, the picture was nearly complete. “What did he tell you about his visit here?”
“Nothing. I asked, of course, many times. But he’d only wink at me. Now, I’m beginning to wish he’d trusted me.”
“Me, too.”
“Is he in trouble?” Krizan said this without any visible worry.
Charles shook his head. Angela’s cell phone rang, and she left the table.
“There’s a bitter woman,” said Krizan, nodding at her backside. “You know what Frank calls her?”
Charles didn’t.
“My blue-eyed wonder.” He grinned. “Lovely man, but he wouldn’t know a lesbian if she punched him in the nose.”
Charles leaned closer as Krizan dug into his calamari. “You can’t think of anything else?”
“It’s hard when you won’t tell me what this is about,” he said, then chewed. “But no. He seemed very normal to me.”
Near the door, Angela pressed a palm against one ear so she could better hear the caller. Charles got up and shook Krizan’s hand. “Thanks for your help.”
“If Frank is in trouble,” said Krizan, holding on to him a moment longer than was polite, “then I hope you’ll be fair with him. He’s put in a lot of good years for your country. If he’s slipped up in the autumn of his life, then who’s to blame him?” That exaggerated shrug returned, and he let Charles go. “We can’t keep to perfection one hundred percent of the time. None of us are God.”
Charles left Krizan to his philosophizing and reached Angela as she hung up, her face red.
“What is it?”
“That was Max.”
“Who?”
“He’s the embassy night clerk. In Vienna. On Thursday night, one of Frank’s informers sent in information about a Russian we’re watching. Big oligarch. Roman Ugrimov.”
Charles knew about Ugrimov—a businessman who’d left Russia to save his skin, but kept influential contacts there as he spread his diversified portfolio around the world. “What kind of information?”
“The blackmail kind.” She paused. “He’s a pedophile.”
“Might be a coincidence,” Charles said as they left the restaurant, entering the long socialist-mauve lobby, where three SOVA agents stood around, watching out for their boss.
“Maybe. But yesterday Ugrimov moved into his new house. In Venice.”
Again, Charles stopped, and Angela had to walk back to him. Staring at the bright lobby windows, the final pieces fitted together. He said, “That’s just across the water. With a boat, it’s ideal.”
“I suppose, but—”
“What does someone with three million dollars in stolen money need most?” Charles cut in. “He needs a new name. A man with Roman Ugrimov’s connections could easily supply papers. If persuaded.”
She didn’t answer, only stared at him.
“One more call,” he said. “Get someone to check with the harbormasters in Venice. Find out if any boats were abandoned in the last two days.”
They waited for the callback in a central café that had yet to adjust to the postcommunist foreigners who now shared their thirty-mile coastline. Behind the zinc counter a heavy matron in a coffee-and-beer-splattered apron served Laško Pivo on tap to underpaid dockworkers. The woman seemed annoyed by Angela’s request for a cappuccino, and when it arrived it turned out to be a too-sweet instant mix. Charles convinced her to just drink it, then asked why she hadn’t told him that Frank’s wife had walked out on him.
She took another sip and made a face. “Lots of people get divorced.”
“It’s one of the most stressful things there is,” he said. “Divorces change people. Often, they get an urge to start again at zero and redo their lives, but better.” He rubbed his nose. “Maybe Frank decided he should’ve been working for the other side all along.”
“There is no other side anymore.”
“Sure there is. Himself.”
She didn’t seem convinced of anything yet. Her phone rang, and as she listened she shook her head in anger—at Frank, at Charles, at herself. Rome station told her that on Sunday morning a boat with Dubrovnik registration tags had been found floating just beyond the Lido’s docks. “They say there’s blood inside,” the station chief explained.
After she’d hung up, Charles offered to drive—he didn’t want her Austrian habits slowing them down. In reply, Angela showed him her stiff middle finger.
He won out in the end, though, because once they were among the tangled hills of the upper peninsula, she started to cry. He got her to pull over, and they switched seats. Near the Italian border, she tried to explain away her hysterical behavior.
“It’s hard. You work years teaching yourself to trust a few people. Not many, but just enough to get by. And once you do trust them, there’s no going back. There can’t be. Because how else can you do your job?”
Charles let that sit without replying, but wondered if this was his own problem. The idea of trusting anyone besides the man who called him with assignments had long ago been proven untenable. Maybe the human body just couldn’t take that level of suspicion.
After showing their passports and crossing into Italy, he took out his cell phone and dialed. He talked a moment to Grainger and repeated back the information he’d received: “Scuola Vecchia della Misericordia. Third door.”
“What was that?” Angela asked when he hung up.
He dialed a second number. After a few rings, Bogdan Krizan warily said, “Da?”
“Go to the docks across from the Hotel Slovenia. Number forty-seven. In the water you’ll find a Bosnian Serb named Dušan Masković. You’ve got that?”
Krizan breathed heavily. “This is about Frank?”
Charles hung up.
5 (#u091b7d02-b9dd-575e-8bcc-09ecba9ad902)
It took three hours to reach Venice and hire a water-taxi—a motoscafo. By five thirty they were at the Lido docks. A sulking young Carabiniere with a wishful mustache was waiting by the abandoned motorboat—the Venetians had been told to expect visitors, but to not set up a welcome party. He raised the red police tape for them, but didn’t follow them aboard. It was all there—the Dubrovnik registration papers, the filthy cabin littered with spare engine parts, and, in one corner, a brown splash of sun-dried blood.
They didn’t spend long on it. The only things Frank Dawdle had left in that boat were his fingerprints and the chronology of the killing. Standing in the middle of the cabin, Charles held out two fingers in an imitation pistol. “Shoots him here, then drags him out.” He squatted to indicate where the oil on the floor had been smeared, with faint traces of blood. “Maybe he tied that metal tubing to him on the boat, or maybe in the water. It doesn’t matter.”
“No,” said Angela, eyeing him. “It doesn’t.”
They found no shell casings. It was possible the casings had fallen into Portorož Bay, but it was also possible that Frank had followed Company procedure and collected them, even though he’d left his prints. Panic, maybe, but that, too, didn’t matter.
They thanked the Carabiniere, who muttered “Prego” while staring at Angela’s breasts, then found the motoscafo driver waiting on the dock with an unlit cigarette between his lips. Behind him, the sun was low. He informed them that the meter was still running, and it had passed 150,000 lire. He seemed very pleased when neither passenger made a fuss.
It took another twenty minutes to ride back up the Grand Canal, the bumpy path taking them up to the Cannaregio district, where the Russian businessman, Roman Ugrimov, had just moved in. “He’s into everything,” Angela explained. “Russian utilities, Austrian land development—even a South African gold mine.”
He squinted in the hot breeze at a passing vaporetto full of tourists. “Moved to Vienna two years ago, didn’t he?”
“That’s when we started investigating. Lots of dirt, but nothing sticks.”
“Ugrimov’s security is tight?”
“Unbelievable. Frank wanted evidence of his pedophilia. He travels with a thirteen-year-old niece. But she’s no niece. We’re sure of that.”
“How do you get dirt on him?”
Angela gripped the edge of the rocking boat to keep balanced. “Frank found a source. He really is quite good at his job.”
“That’s what worries me.”
He paid the driver once they’d reached the vaporetto stop at Ca’ d’Oro, tipping him handsomely, and they broke through crowds of milling tourists to reach the maze of empty backstreets. Finally, after some guesswork, they found the open area—not quite a square—of Rio Terrá Barba Fruttariol.
Roman Ugrimov’s palazzo was a dilapidated but ornate corner building that rose up high. It opened onto Barba Fruttariol, but the long, covered terrace that Angela gazed at, shielding her eyes with a hand, wrapped around to a side street. “Impressive,” she said.
“A lot of ex-KGB live in impressive houses.”
“KGB?” She stared at him. “You already know about this guy. How?”
Charles touched the envelope of Dexedrine in his pocket for comfort. “I hear things.”
“Oh. I don’t have clearance.”
Charles didn’t bother answering.
“You want to run this, then?”
“I’d rather you did. I don’t carry a Company ID.”
“Curiouser and curiouser,” Angela said as she rang the front bell.
She showed her State Department ID to a bald, cliché-ridden bodyguard with a wired earplug and asked to speak with Roman Ugrimov. The large man spoke Russian into his lapel, listened to an answer, then walked them up a dim, steep stairwell of worn stone. At the top, he unlocked a heavy wooden door.
Ugrimov’s apartment seemed to have been flown in direct from Manhattan: shimmering wood floors, modern designer furniture, plasma television, and double-paned sliding doors leading to a long terrace that overlooked an evening panorama of Venetian rooftops to the Grand Canal. Even Charles had to admit it was breathtaking.
Ugrimov himself was seated at a steel table in a high-backed chair, reading from a notebook computer. He smiled at them, feigning surprise, and got up with an outstretched hand. “The first visitors to my new home,” he said in easy English. “Welcome.”
He was tall, fiftyish, with wavy gray hair and a bright smile. Despite heavy eyes that matched Charles’s, he had a youthful vitality about him.
After the introductions, he led them to the overdesigned sofas. “Now, please. Tell me what I can do for my American friends.”
Angela handed over her photograph of Frank Dawdle. Ugrimov slipped on some wide Ralph Lauren bifocals and tilted it in the failing evening light. “Who’s this supposed to be?”
“He works for the American government,” said Angela.
“CIA, too?”
“We’re just embassy staff. He’s been missing three days.”
“Oh.” Ugrimov handed back the photo. “That must be troubling.”
“It is,” Angela said. “You’re sure he hasn’t come to see you?”
“Nikolai,” said Ugrimov, and in Russian asked, “Have we had any visitors?”
The bodyguard rolled out his lower lip and shook his head.
Ugrimov shrugged. “Nothing, I’m afraid. Perhaps you can tell me why you think he would come here. I don’t know this man, do I?”
Charles said, “He was looking into your life just before he disappeared.”
“Oh,” the Russian said again. He raised a finger. “You’re telling me that someone at the American embassy in Vienna has been looking into my life and works?”
“You’d be insulted if they didn’t,” said Charles.
Ugrimov grinned. “Okay. Let me offer some drinks. Or are you on the job?”
To Charles’s annoyance, Angela said, “We’re on the job,” and stood. She handed over a business card. “If Mr. Dawdle does get in contact with you, then please call me.”
“I’ll be sure to do that.” He turned to Charles. “Do svidaniya.”
Charles repeated the Russian farewell back to him.
Once they were down the steps and in the dark street, the air moist and still warm, Angela yawned again and said, “What was that?”
“What?”
“How’d he know you spoke Russian?”
“I’m telling you, I need a new name.” Charles looked up the length of the street. “The Russian community’s not so big.”
“Not so small either,” said Angela. “What’re you looking for?”
“There.” He didn’t point, only nodded at a small sign at the corner indicating an osteria. “Let’s take a long walk around to there. Eat and watch.”
“You don’t trust him?”
“A man like that—he’d never admit it if Dawdle came to him.”
“Watch if you want. I need some sleep.”
“How about a pill?”
“First one’s free?” she said, then winked and stifled another yawn. “I have embassy drug tests to contend with.”
“Then at least leave me one of your cigarettes.”
“When did you start smoking?”
“I’m in the midst of quitting.”
She tapped one out for him, but before handing it over said, “Is it the drugs that do it to you? Or the job?”
“Do what?”
“Maybe it’s all the names.” She handed over the cigarette. “Maybe that’s what’s made you so cold. When you were Milo, you were a different person.”
He blinked at her, thinking, but no reply came to him.
6 (#u091b7d02-b9dd-575e-8bcc-09ecba9ad902)
He spent the first part of his night watch at the little osteria, looking down Barba Fruttariol, eating a dinner of cicchetti—small portions of seafood and grilled vegetables—and washing it down with a delicious Chianti. The bartender tried to start a conversation, but Charles preferred silence, so when the man rattled on about George Michael, “certainly the greatest singer in the world,” he didn’t bother contradicting or agreeing. The man’s banter became dull background noise.
Someone had left behind a copy of the day’s Herald Tribune, and he mused over the stories for a while, in particular a statement by U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld that “according to some estimates we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions,” which amounted to about a quarter of the Pentagon budget. A certain Senator Nathan Irwin from Minnesota, breaking party ties, called it “a damned disgrace.” Not even that could hold his attention, though, and he folded the paper and put it aside.
He wasn’t thinking about suicide, but about the Bigger Voice, that thing his mother used to discuss with him during her occasional nocturnal visits in the seventies, when he was a child in North Carolina. “Look at everyone,” she told him, “and see what guides them. Little voices—television, politicians, priests, money. Those are the little voices, and they blot out the one big voice we all have. But listen to me—the little voices mean nothing. All they do is deceive. You understand?”
He’d been too young to understand, and too old to admit his ignorance. Her visits never lasted long enough for her to explain it well enough. He was always tired when she arrived in the middle of the night to rap on his window and carry him out to the nearby park.
“I am your mom, but you won’t call me mom. I won’t let you be oppressed, and I won’t let you oppress me with that word. You won’t even call me Ellen—that’s my slave name. My liberation name is Elsa. Can you say that?”
“Elsa.”
“Excellent.”
His early childhood was punctuated by these dreams—because that’s how they felt to him: dreams of a ghost-mother’s visitations with her brief lesson plans. In a year, she might come three or four times; when he was eight, she came nightly for an entire week and focused her lessons on his liberation. She explained that when he was a little older—twelve or thirteen—she would take him away with her, because by then he would be able to understand the doctrine of total war. Against whom? Against the little voices. Though he understood so little, he was excited by the thought of disappearing into the night with her. But he never did. After that intense week, the dreams never returned, and only much later would he learn that she’d died before she could bring him into the fold. In a German prison. By suicide.
Was that the Bigger Voice? The voice that spoke from the stone walls of Stuttgart’s Stammheim Prison, convincing her to remove her prison pants, tie one leg to the bars on her door, the other to her neck, and then sit down with all the enthusiasm of a zealot?
He wondered if she could have done that had she kept her real name. Could she have done it if she had still called herself a mother? He wondered if he could have survived these last years, or chosen so casually to end his life, if he had kept hold of his own name.
There he was again, back to thoughts of suicide.
When the restaurant closed at ten, he again checked Ugrimov’s front door, then jogged westward, sometimes frustrated by dead ends, until he’d reached the waterside porticos of the Scuola Vecchia della Misericordia. The third door, Grainger had said, so he counted to three, then, despite his stomach again acting up, lay flat on the cobblestones to reach over the edge of the walkway, down toward the rancid-smelling canal.
Unable to see, he had to do it by feel, touching stones until he felt the one that was different from the others. By now, these selected cubbyholes were over fifty years old, having been added to the architecture of postwar Europe by the members of the Pond, a CIA precursor. Remarkable foresight. Many had been discovered, while others had broken open on their own from poor workmanship, but occasionally the surviving ones proved invaluable. He closed his eyes to help his sense of touch. On the bottom edge of the stone was a latch; he pulled it, and the stone separated into his hand. He placed the lid beside himself and reached inside the exposed hole to find a weighty plastic-wrapped object, sealed airtight. He took it out, and in the moonlight ripped it open. Inside lay a Walther P99 with two clips of ammunition, all like new.
He replaced the stone’s cover, returned to Barba Fruttariol, and worked his way around the area, circling the palazzo as he wandered dark side streets, always returning at different angles to watch the front door or peer up to the lights along Roman Ugrimov’s terrace. Sometimes he spotted figures up there—Ugrimov, his guards, and a young girl with long, straight brown hair. The “niece.” But only the guards passed through the front door, returning with groceries, bottles of wine and liquor, and, once, a wooden humidor. After midnight he heard music wafting down—opera—and was surprised by the choice.
While the mewing cats ignored him, a total of three drunks tried to become his friend that night. Silence worked on all except the third, who put his arm around Charles’s shoulder and talked in four languages, trying to find the one that would make him answer. In a swift and unexpected surge of emotion, Charles thrust his elbow into the man’s ribs, cupped a hand over his mouth, and punched him twice, hard, on the back of his head. With the first hit, the man gurgled; with the second, he passed out. Charles held the limp man a few seconds, hating himself, then dragged him down the street, across an arched bridge spanning the Rio dei Santi Apostoli, and hid the drunk in an alley.
Balance—that word returned to him as he crossed the bridge again, trembling. Without balance, a life is no longer worth the effort.
He’d been doing his particular job for six—no, seven—years, floating unmoored from city to city, engaged by transatlantic phone calls from a man he hadn’t seen in two years. The phone itself was his master. Weeks sometimes passed without work, and in those periods he slept and drank heavily, but when he was on the job there was no way to stop the brutal forward movement. He had to suck down whatever stimulants would keep him in motion, because the job had never been about keeping Charles Alexander in good health. The job was only about the quiet, anonymous maintenance of the kindly named “sphere of influence,” Charles Alexander and others like him be damned.
Angela had said, “There is no other side anymore,” but there was. The other side was multifaceted: Russian mafias, Chinese industrialization, loose nukes, and even the vocal Muslims camped in Afghani stan who were trying to pry Washington’s fingers off the oil-soaked Middle East. As Grainger would put it, anyone who could not be embraced or absorbed by the empire was anathema and had to be dealt with, like barbarians at the gates. That was when Charles Alexander’s phone would ring.
He wondered how many bodies padded the murky floor of these canals, and the thought of joining them was, if nothing else, a comfort. It is because of death that death means nothing; it’s because of death that life means nothing.
Finish the job, he thought. Don’t go out in failure. And then …
No more planes and border guards and customs people; no more lookingover your shoulder.
By five, it was decided. The prescient glow before dawn lit the sky, and he dry-swallowed two more Dexedrine. The jitters returned. He remembered his mother and her dreams of a utopia with only big voices. What would she think of him? He knew: She would want to beat him senseless. He’d spent his entire adult life working for the procurers and manufacturers of those insidious little voices.
When, at nine thirty, the George Michael fan unlocked the osteria again, Charles was surprised to find himself still breathing. He ordered two espressos and waited patiently by the window while the man cooked up a pancetta, egg, garlic, oil, and linguine mix for his dour, sickly customer. It was delicious, but halfway through his plate he stopped, peering out the window.
Three people were approaching the palazzo. The bodyguard he’d seen yesterday—Nikolai—and, close behind, a very pregnant woman with an older man. That older man was Frank Dawdle.
He dialed his cell phone.
“Yeah?” said Angela.
“He’s here.”
Charles pocketed the phone and laid down money. The bartender, serving an old couple, looked angry. “You don’t like the breakfast?”
“Leave it out,” Charles said. “I’ll finish it in a minute.”
By the time Angela arrived, her hair damp from an interrupted shower, the visitors had been inside the palazzo for twelve minutes. There were four tourists along the length of the street, and he hoped they would clear out soon. “You have a gun?” Charles asked as he took out his Walther.
Angela pulled back her jacket to show off a SIG Sauer in a shoulder holster.
“Keep it there. If someone has to get shot, I better do it. I can disappear; you can’t.”
“So you’re watching out for me.”
“Yeah, Angela. I am watching out for you.”
She pursed her lips. “You’re also afraid I won’t be able to shoot him.” Her gaze dropped to his trembling gun hand. “But I’m not sure you’ll even be able to shoot straight.”
He squeezed the Walther until the shaking lessened. “I’ll do fine. You get over there,” he said, pointing at a doorway just beyond, and opposite, the palazzo’s entrance. “He’ll be boxed in. He comes out, we make the arrest. Simple.”
“Simple,” she replied curtly, then walked to her assigned doorway as the tourists, thankfully, left the street.
Once she was out of sight, he reexamined his hand. She was right, of course. Angela Yates usually was. He couldn’t go on like this, and he wouldn’t. It was a miserable job; it was a miserable life.
The palazzo’s front door opened.
Bald Nikolai opened it, but remained inside, his tailored jacket arm holding the bloated wooden door so that the pregnant woman— who Charles could now see was very beautiful, her bright green eyes flashing across the square—could step over the threshold and onto the cobbles. Then came Dawdle, touching her elbow. He looked every one of his sixty-two years, and more.
The bodyguard closed the door behind them, and the woman turned to say something to Dawdle, but Dawdle didn’t answer. He was looking at Angela, who had emerged from her doorway and was running in his direction. “Frank!” she shouted.
Charles had missed his cue. He began running, too, the Walther in his hand.
A man’s voice shouted from the sky in easy English: “And her Ilove, you bastard!” Then a rising wail, like a steam-engine whistle, filled the air.
Unlike the other three people in the street, Charles didn’t look up. Distractions, he knew, are usually just that. He hurtled forward. The pregnant woman, eyes aloft, screamed and stepped back. Frank Dawdle was stuck to the ground. Angela’s flared jacket dropped as she halted and opened her mouth, but made no sound. Beside the pregnant woman, something pink hit the earth. It was 10:27 A.M.
He stumbled to a stop. Perhaps it was a bomb. But bombs weren’t pink, and they didn’t hit like that. They exploded or crashed into the ground with hard noises. This pink thing hit with a soft, wretched thump. That’s when he knew it was a body. On one side, spread among the splash of blood on the cobblestones, he saw a scatter of long hair—it was the pretty girl he’d spotted on the terrace last night.
He looked up, but the terrace was again empty. The pregnant woman screamed, tripped, and fell backward.
Frank Dawdle produced a pistol and shot wildly three times, the sound echoing off the stones, then turned and ran. Angela bolted after him, shouting, “Stop! Frank!”
Charles Alexander was trained to follow through with actions even when faced with the unpredictable, but what he saw—the falling girl, the shots, the fleeing man—each thing seemed only to confuse him more.
How did the pregnant woman fit into this?
His breathing was suddenly difficult, but he reached her. She kept screaming. Red face, eyes rolling. Her words were a garbled mess.
His chest really did feel strange, so he sat heavily on the ground beside her. That’s when he noticed all the blood. Not the girl’s—she was on the other side of the hysterical woman—but his own. He could see that now. It pumped a red blossom into his shirt.
How about that? He was exhausted. Red rivulets filled the spaces between the cobblestones. I’m dead. Off to the left, Angela ran after the dwindling form of Frank Dawdle.
Amid the indecipherable noises coming from the pregnant woman, he heard one clear phrase: “I’m in labor!”
He blinked at her, wanting to say, But I’m dying, I can’t help you. Then he read the desperation in her sweaty face. She really did want to stay alive. Why?
“I need a doctor!” the woman shouted.
“I—” he began, and looked around. Angela and Dawdle had disappeared; they were just distant footfalls around a far corner.
“Get a fucking doctor!” the woman screamed, close to his ear. From around that far corner he heard the three short cracks of Angela’s SIG Sauer.
He took out his telephone. The woman was terrified, so he whispered, “It’ll be all right,” and dialed 118, the Italian medical emergency number. In stilted, too-quiet Italian from just one painful lung, he explained that a woman on the Rio Terrá Barba Fruttariol was having a baby. Help was promised. He hung up. His blood was no longer a network of rivulets on the ground; it formed an elongated pool.
The woman was calmer now, but she still gasped for breath. She looked desperate. When he gripped her hand, she squeezed back with unexpected strength. Over her heaving belly, he looked at the dead girl in pink. In the distance, Angela reappeared as a small form, hunched, walking like a drunk.
“Who the hell are you?” the pregnant woman finally managed.
“What?”
She took a moment to regulate her breaths, gritted her teeth. “You’ve got a gun.”
The Walther was still in his other hand. He released it; it clattered to the ground as a red haze filled his vision.
“What,” she said, then exhaled through pursed lips, blowing three times. “What the hell are you?”
He choked on his words, so he paused and squeezed her hand tighter. He tried again. “I’m a Tourist,” he said, though as he blacked out on the cobblestones he knew that he no longer was.
(#u091b7d02-b9dd-575e-8bcc-09ecba9ad902)
Part One (#u091b7d02-b9dd-575e-8bcc-09ecba9ad902)
Problems of the INTERNATIONAL TOURIST TRADE (#u091b7d02-b9dd-575e-8bcc-09ecba9ad902)
WEDNESDAY, JULY 4 TO
THURSDAY, JULY 19, 2007
1 (#u091b7d02-b9dd-575e-8bcc-09ecba9ad902)
The Tiger. It was the kind of moniker that worked well in Southeast Asia, or India, which was why the Company long assumed the assassin was Asian. Only after 2003, when those few photos trickled in and were verified, did everyone realize he was of European descent. Which raised the question: Why “the Tiger”?
Company psychologists, unsurprisingly, disagreed. The one remaining Freudian claimed there was a sexual dysfunction the assassin was trying to hide. Another felt it referenced the Chinese “tiger boys” myth, concerning boys who morphed into tigers when they entered the forest. A New Mexico analyst put forth her own theory that it came from the Native American tiger-symbol, meaning “confidence, spontaneity, and strength.” To which the Freudian asked in a terse memo, “When did the tiger become indigenous to North America?”
Milo Weaver didn’t care. The Tiger, who was now traveling under the name Samuel Roth (Israeli passport #6173882, b. 6/19/66), had arrived in the United States from Mexico City, landing in Dallas, and Milo had spent the last three nights on his trail, camped in a rental Chevy picked up from Dallas International. Little clues, mere nuances, had kept him moving eastward and south to the fringes of battered New Orleans, then winding north through Mississippi until late last night, near Fayette, when Tom Grainger called from New York. “Just came over the wire, buddy. They’ve got a Samuel Roth in Blackdale, Tennessee—domestic abuse arrest.”
“Domestic abuse? Can’t be him.”
“Description fits.”
“Okay.” Milo searched the cola-stained map flopping in the warm evening wind. He found Blackdale, a tiny speck. “Let them know I’m coming. Tell them to put him in solitary. If they’ve got solitary.”
By the time he rolled into Blackdale that Independence Day morning, his travel companions were three days’ worth of crumpled McDonald’s cups and bags, highway toll receipts, candy wrappers, and two empty Smirnoff bottles—but no cigarette butts; he’d at least kept that promise to his wife. In his overstuffed wallet he’d collected more receipts that charted his path: dinner at a Dallas-area Fuddruckers, Louisiana barbecue, motels in Sulphur, LA, and Brookhaven, MS, and a stack of gas station receipts charged to his Company card.
Milo shouldn’t have liked Blackdale. It was outside his comfortable beat of early twenty-first-century metropolises. Lost in the flag-draped kudzu wasteland of Hardeman County, between the Elvisology of Memphis and the Tennessee River’s tri-border intersection with Mississippi and Alabama, Blackdale didn’t look promising. Worse, it was as he drove into town that he realized there was no way he could make his daughter’s July Fourth talent show that afternoon back in Brooklyn.
Yet he did like Blackdale and its sheriff, Manny Wilcox. The sweating, overweight officer of the law showed surprising hospitality to someone from the most-despised profession, and didn’t ask a thing about jurisdiction or whose business their prisoner really was. That helped Milo’s mood. The too-sweet lemonade brought in by a mustached deputy named Leslie also helped. The station had a huge supply on tap in orange ten-gallon coolers, prepared by Wilcox’s wife, Eileen. It was just what Milo’s hangover had been pleading for.
Manny Wilcox wiped perspiration off his temple. “I will have to get your signature, understand.”
“I’d expect nothing less,” Milo said. “Maybe you can tell me how you caught him.”
Wilcox lifted his glass to stare at the condensation, then sniffed. Milo hadn’t showered in two days; the proof was all over the sheriff’s face. “Wasn’t us. His girl—Kathy Hendrickson. A N’Orleans working girl. Apparently she didn’t like his kind of lovemaking. Called 911. Said the man was a killer. Was beating on her.”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that. Picked him up late last night. I guess that’s how you guys got it, from the 911 dispatch. The hooker had a few bruises, a bloody lip. They were fresh. Verified his name with the passport. Israeli. Then we found another passport in his car. Eye-talian.”
“Fabio Lanzetti,” said Milo.
Wilcox opened his calloused hands. “There you go. We’d just squeezed him into the cell when your people called us.”
It was about two inches beyond belief. Six years ago, unbalanced and living under a different name, Milo had first run into the Tiger in Amsterdam. Over the ensuing six years, the man had been spotted and lost in Italy, Germany, the Arab Emirates, Afghani stan, and Israel. Now, he’d been trapped in a last-chance motel near the Mississippi border, turned in by a Louisiana prostitute.
“Nothing more?” he asked the sheriff. “No one else tipped you off? Just the woman?”
The flesh under Wilcox’s chin vibrated. “That’s it. But this guy, Sam Roth … is that even his real name?”
Milo decided that the sheriff deserved something for his hospitality. “Manny, we’re not sure what his name is. Each time he pops up on our radar, it’s different. But his girlfriend might know something. Where’s she now?”
The sheriff toyed with his damp glass, embarrassed. “Back at the motel. Had no cause to keep hold of her.”
“I’ll want her, too.”
“Leslie can pick her up,” Wilcox assured him. “But tell me—your chief said something about this—is that boy really called the Tiger?” “If it’s who we think it is, yes. That’s what he’s called.”
Wilcox grunted his amusement. “Not much of a tiger now. Pussycat, more like. He walks funny, too, kind of weak.”
Milo finished his lemonade, and Wilcox offered more. He could see how the police got hooked on Mrs. Wilcox’s homebrew. “Don’t be fooled, Sheriff. Remember last year, in France?”
“Their president?”
“Foreign minister. And in Germany there was the head of an Islamist group.”
“A terrorist?”
“Religious leader. His car exploded with him in it. And in London that businessman—”
“The one who bought the airline!” Wilcox shouted, happy to know at least this one. “Don’t tell me this joker killed him, too. Three people?”
“Those are the three from last year we can definitely pin on him. He’s been in business at least a decade.” When the sheriff’s brows rose, Milo knew he’d shared enough. No need to terrify the man. “But like I said, Sheriff, I need to talk to him to be sure.”
Wilcox rapped his knuckles on his desk, hard enough to shake the computer monitor. “Well, then. Let’s get you talking.”
2 (#u091b7d02-b9dd-575e-8bcc-09ecba9ad902)
The sheriff had moved three drunks and two spousal abusers to the group cell, leaving Samuel Roth alone in a small cinder-block room with a steel door and no window. Milo peered through the door’s barred hatch. A fluorescent tube burned from the ceiling, illuminating the thin cot and aluminum toilet.
To call his search for the Tiger obsessive would have been, according to Grainger, an understatement. In 2001, soon after he’d recovered from his bullet wounds in Vienna and retired from Tourism, Milo decided that while his coworkers devoted themselves to finding the Most Famous Muslim in the World somewhere in Afghani stan, he would spend his time on terrorism’s more surgical arms. Terrorist acts, by definition, were blunt and messy. But when someone like bin Laden or al-Zarqawi needed a specific person taken out, he, like the rest of the world, went to the professionals. In the assassination business, there were few better than the Tiger.
So over the last six years, from his twenty-second-floor cubicle in the Company office on the Avenue of the Americas, he’d tracked this one man through the cities of the world, but never close enough for an arrest.
Now, here he was, the man from that embarrassingly meager file Milo knew so well, sitting comfortably on a cot, his back to the wall and his orange-clad legs stretched out, crossed at the ankles. Samuel Roth, or Hamad al-Abari, or Fabio Lanzetti—or five other names they knew of. The assassin didn’t check to see who was peering in at him; he left his arms knotted over his chest as Milo entered.
“Samuel,” Milo said as a deputy locked the door behind him. He didn’t approach, just waited for the man to look at him.
Even in this light, with its harsh shadows and the way it yellowed his skin, Roth’s face recalled the three other photographs back at the office. One from Abu Dhabi, as al-Abari, his features half obscured by a white turban. A second from Milan, as Lanzetti, at a café along the Corso Sempione, talking with a red-bearded man they’d never been able to identify. The third was CCTV footage from outside a mosque in Frankfurt, where he’d planted a bomb under a black Mercedes-Benz. Each remembered image matched these heavy brows and gaunt cheeks, the pitch eyes and high, narrow forehead. Sometimes a mustache or beard hid aspects of the face, but now his only mask was a three-day beard that grew to the top of his cheekbones. His skin was splotchy in this light, peeling from an old sunburn.
Milo remained beside the door. “Samuel Roth—that’s the name we’ll use for now. It’s easy to pronounce.”
Roth only blinked in reply.
“You know why I’m here. It has nothing to do with your problems with women. I want to know why you’re in the United States.”
“Кaк вac зoвут, мудаки?” said Roth.
Milo grimaced. He was going to have to go through the motions. At least a change of language would hide their talk from these Tennessee boys. In Russian, he answered, “I’m Milo Weaver, of the Central Intelligence Agency.”
Samuel Roth looked as if that were the funniest name he had ever heard.
“What?”
“Sorry,” Roth said in fluent English. He raised a hand. “Even after all this, I still didn’t expect it to work.” He had the flat, irregular accent of someone who’d absorbed too many.
“What didn’t you expect to work?”
“I’m lucky I even remember you. I forget a lot of things these days.”
“If you don’t answer my questions, I’ll hurt you. I am authorized.”
The prisoner’s eyes widened; they were bloodshot and tired.
“There’s only one reason you’d risk entering the country. Who are you supposed to kill?”
Roth chewed the inside of his cheek, then spoke in a laconic tone: “Maybe you, Company man.”
“We were tracking you since Barcelona—you know that? To Mexico, then Dallas, and that rented car to New Orleans where you picked up your girlfriend. Maybe you just wanted to know if she survived Katrina. You switched to your Italian passport—Fabio Lanzetti—before switching back in Mississippi. Changing names is a nice trick, but it’s not foolproof.”
Roth cocked his head. “You’d know that, wouldn’t you?”
“Would I?”
Samuel Roth wiped his dry lips with his fingers, stifling a cough. When he spoke, he sounded congested. “I’ve heard a lot about you. Milo Weaver—a.k.a. many other names. Alexander.” He pointed at Milo. “That’s the name I know best. Charles Alexander.”
“No idea what you’re talking about,” Milo said as nonchalantly as he could manage.
“You’ve got a long history,” Roth continued. “An interesting one. You were a Tourist.”
A shrug. “Everyone likes a vacation.”
“Remember 2001? Before those Muslims ruined business. Amsterdam. Back then, I only worried about people like you, people who work for governments, ruining my business. These days …” He shook his head.
Milo remembered 2001 better than most years. “I’ve never been to Amsterdam,” he lied.
“You’re curious, Milo Weaver. I’ve seen files on lots of people, but you … there’s no center to your history.”
“Center?” Milo moved two steps closer, an arm’s length from the prisoner.
Roth’s lids drooped over his bloodshot eyes. “There’s no motivation connecting the events of your past.”
“Sure there is. Fast cars and girls. Isn’t that your motivation?”
Samuel Roth seemed to like that. He wiped his mouth again to cover a large grin; above his sunburned cheeks his eyes looked very wet, sick. “Well, you’re certainly not motivated by your own well-being, or else you’d be somewhere else. Moscow, perhaps, where they take care of their agents. At least, where agents know how to take care of themselves.”
“Is that what you are? Russian?”
Roth ignored that. “Maybe you just want to be on the winning side. Some people, they like to bend with history. But history’s tricky. Today’s monolith is tomorrow’s pile of rocks. No.” He shook his head. “That’s not it. I think you’re loyal to your family now. That would make sense. Your wife and daughter. Tina and … Stephanie, is it?”
Involuntarily, Milo shot out a hand and gripped Roth’s shirt at the buttons, lifting him from the cot. This close, he could see that his dry, peeling face was riddled with pink sores. This was not sunburn. With his other hand, he squeezed Roth’s jaw to hold his face still. There was rot in the man’s breath. “No need to bring them into this,” Milo said, then let go. When Roth fell back onto the cot, his head knocked against the wall.
How had this man turned the interrogation around?
“Just trying to make conversation,” said Roth, rubbing the back of his skull. “That’s why I’m here, you know. To see you.”
Instead of questioning that, Milo went for the door. He could at least squelch Roth’s one voiced desire by removing himself from the room.
“Where are you going?”
Good—he sounded worried. Milo tapped the door, and one of the deputies started working the lock.
“Wait!” called Roth. “I have information!”
Milo jerked the door open as Roth again called, “Wait!” He didn’t slow down. He left the room and kept moving as the deputy pushed the steel door shut.
3 (#u091b7d02-b9dd-575e-8bcc-09ecba9ad902)
The sultry noontime heat swallowed him as he fooled with the new Company-issue Nokia he was still learning to master, finally finding the number. Between a parked blue-and-white and the dead shrubs around the station, he watched as storm clouds began to fill the sky. Grainger answered with a sharp “What is it?”
Tom Grainger sounded the kind of irate people are when they’ve been abruptly woken, but it was nearly noon. “I’m verifying it, Tom. It’s him.”
“Good. I don’t suppose he’s talking, is he?”
“Not really. But he is trying to piss me off. He’s seen a file on me. Knows about Tina and Stef.”
“Jesus. How’d he get that?”
“There’s a girlfriend. She might know something. They’re bringing her in now.” He paused. “But he’s sick, Tom. Really sick. I’m not sure he could make a journey.”
“What’s he got?”
“Don’t know yet.”
When Grainger sighed, Milo imagined him kicking back in his Aeron chair, gazing out his window across the Manhattan skyline. Faced with the dusty pale-brick buildings along Blackdale’s main street—half of them out of business but covered with Independence Day flags—Milo was suddenly jealous. Grainger said, “Just so you know—you’ve got one hour to make him talk.”
“Don’t tell me.”
“I’m telling you. Some jackass at Langley sent an e-mail off the open server. I’ve spent the last half hour fending off Homeland with make-believe. If I hear the word ‘jurisdiction’ one more time, I’ll have a fit.”
Milo stepped back as a deputy got into the police car and started it up. He returned to the station’s glass double doors. “My hopes are with the girlfriend. Whatever game he’s playing, he won’t play by my rules until I have something on him. Or if he’s under duress.”
“Can you put it to him there?”
Milo considered this as the police car left and another parked in its place. The sheriff might turn a blind eye to rough treatment, but he wasn’t sure about the deputies. There was something wide-eyed about them. “I’ll see once the girl’s here.”
“If Homeland hadn’t been shouting at me all morning, I’d tell you to break him out and bundle him for shipment. But we don’t have a choice.”
“You don’t think they’ll share him?”
His chief grunted. “It’s me who doesn’t want to share. Be a good boy and let them have him, but whatever he says to you is only for us. Okay?”
“Sure.” Milo noticed that the mustached deputy getting out of the car was Leslie, the one who’d been sent to pick up Kathy Hendrickson. He was alone. “Call you back,” Milo said and hung up. “Where’s the girl?”
Leslie held his wide-brimmed hat in his hands, nervously rotating it. “Checked out, sir. Late last night, couple hours after we released her.”
“I see, Deputy. Thanks.”
On the way back inside, Milo called home, knowing that at this hour no one would be there to pick up. Tina would check the messages from work once she realized he was running late. He kept it short and concise. He was sorry to miss Stephanie’s performance, but didn’t overplay his guilt. Besides, next week they’d all be together in Disney World, and he’d have plenty of time to make it up to his daughter. He suggested she invite Stephanie’s biological father, Patrick. “And videotape it, will you? I want to see.”
He found Wilcox in the break room, having a fight with the soda machine. “I thought you kept to lemonade, Manny.”
Wilcox cleared his throat. “I’ve had it up to here with lemons.” He wagged a chunky finger. “You let that slip to my wife, and I’ll have your ass on a platter.”
“Let’s make a deal.” Milo came closer. “I’ll keep your wife in the dark if you give me an hour alone with your prisoner.”
Wilcox straightened, head back, and peered down at him. “You’re talking alone-alone?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And you think that’s a good idea?”
“Why not?”
Sheriff Wilcox scratched the back of his flabby neck; his beige collar was brown from sweat. “Well, the papers are eating you guys up. Every day there’s another yokel shouting about CIA corruption. I mean, I know how to keep my mouth shut, but a small town like this …”
“Don’t worry. I know what I’m doing.”
The sheriff pursed his lips, deforming his big nose. “Matter of national security, is it?”
“The most national, Manny. And the most secure.”
4 (#u091b7d02-b9dd-575e-8bcc-09ecba9ad902)
When Milo returned to the cell, Samuel Roth sat up as if he’d been waiting for this chat, a sudden wellspring of energy at his disposal. “Hello again,” he said once the door had locked.
“Who showed you my file?”
“A friend. An ex-friend.” Roth paused. “Okay, my worst enemy. He’s seriously bad news.”
“Someone I know?”
“I don’t even know him. I never met him. Just his intermediary.”
“So he’s a client.”
Roth smiled, his dry lips cracking. “Exactly. He gave me some paperwork on you. A gift, he said, for some trouble he’d put me through. He said that you were the one who ruined the Amsterdam job. He also said you were running my case. That, of course, is why I’m here.”
“You’re here,” Milo said, reaching the center of the cell, “because you beat up a woman and thought she wouldn’t pay you back for it.”
“Is that what you really think?”
Milo didn’t answer—they both knew it was an unlikely scenario.
“I’m here,” Roth said, waving at the concrete walls, “because I wanted to talk to Milo Weaver, once known as Charles Alexander. Only you. You’re the only Company man who ever actually stopped me. You’ve got my respect.”
“In Amsterdam.”
“Yes.”
“That’s funny.”
“Is it?”
“Six years ago in Amsterdam, I was high on amphetamines. Completely strung out. I didn’t know half of what I was doing.”
Roth stared at him, then blinked. “Really?”
“I was suicidal. I tried to walk into your line of fire, just to finish myself off.”
“Well,” said Roth, considering the news. “Either I was never as good as I thought, or you’re so good you could beat me blind and drunk. So … it stands. You have even more of my respect now. And that’s a rare and wonderful thing.”
“You wanted to talk to me. Why not pick up a phone?”
The assassin rocked his head from side to side. “That, as you know, is unverifiable. I would’ve been handed to some clerk for an hour, answering questions. If he didn’t hang up on me, he would’ve called Tom—Tom Grainger, right?—and then the whole department would be involved. No. I only wanted you.”
“Still, there are easier ways. Cheaper ways.”
“Money doesn’t mean anything anymore,” Roth said patiently. “Besides, it was fun. I had to give one last chase. Not so difficult a chase that you’d lose me, but not so easy that the FBI or Homeland Security would stumble across me when I arrived in Dallas. No, I had to set up a trail outside the country that you—because you’ve been responsible for my case these last years—would be watching. Then I had to lead you around this enormous country. I’d hoped to make it all the way to Washington, or even to your home in Brooklyn, but it wasn’t to be. A lot of things weren’t to be. I wanted to go further. I wanted to really make you work.”
“Why?”
“If I had the time,” Roth explained, “I’d be elusive with you, because it’s a known fact that no decent intelligence operative believes anything he’s told. Each agent needs to beat it out of his subject, or, better yet, discover it on his own, without the subject ever realizing he’s slipped up. But, sadly, there’s no time. It has to be little Blackdale, and it has to be direct, because I won’t be around by tomorrow.”
“Going somewhere?”
Again, that smile.
Milo wasn’t ready to believe this. It was pride, of course, balking against the idea that someone had for the last three days been leading him by the nose. “And Kathy Hendrickson?”
“She only knows that I paid her well for her performance. Yes—and for her bruises. She doesn’t know why. Really, she knows nothing,” he said, then gasped his way into a retching cough. Once it passed, he looked at his hand. “Oh.” He showed his blood-speckled palm to Milo. “Faster than I’d hoped.”
“What is?”
“My death.”
Milo stared at the Tiger’s face, at what he’d wanted to believe were the symptoms of a difficult run through the southern states. Bloodshot eyes, fatigue, and the skin itself. That yellow pallor wasn’t from the fluorescents. “Diagnosis?”
“AIDS.”
“I see.”
The lack of sympathy didn’t faze Roth. “I talked to some doctors in Switzerland—the Hirslanden Clinic, Zürich. You can check on that if you like. Look up Hamad al-Abari. Those mountain Germans are smart. Some new procedure they’ve got to examine the rate of growth through the T-cell count—something like that. They can figure out when the HIV virus got in me. Five months ago, it turns out. February. That places me in Milan.”
“What were you doing in Milan?”
“I met my contact. The intermediary I mentioned before. He goes by the name Jan Klausner, but he can’t speak decent German or Czech. From his accent, he might be Dutch. Midforties. His red beard is the only real thing about him.”
Milo remembered that file photo of Fabio Lanzetti—Milan, the Corso Sempione, with a bearded man. “We’ve got a picture of you two together.”
“Good start.”
“He gave you a job?”
“He’s been feeding me jobs for years. Actually, the first one came six years ago, not long after Amsterdam. A surprise. I worried my failure there had made the rounds, that work would dry up. But then Jan showed up. The work was irregular—one or two a year—but it paid well. His last order was for January. A job in Khartoum. Mullah Salih Ahmad.”
Milo thought back. The Sudan. January.
In January, a popular radical cleric known for inflammatory pro-al-Qaeda speeches, Mullah Salih Ahmad, had disappeared. Two days later, his garroted corpse was found in his own backyard. It had been international news for about five minutes, quickly overcome by the continuing civil war in the western Darfur region, but in the Sudan it stayed brutally current, and the blame was placed on the president, Omar al-Bashir, who seldom let critics remain in the limelight, or out of jail. Demonstrations followed, met by battle-gear police with guns. In the last month, more than forty had been killed in riots.
“Who hired you?”
The energy seemed to go out of Roth, and he stared, unfocused, past his interrogator. Milo didn’t bother breaking the trance, though he imagined SUVs full of Homeland Security barreling down the dusty Tennessee roads toward them.
Finally, Roth shook his head. “Sorry. The doctors call it AIDS dementia. I lose track of stuff, forget things. Can hardly walk.” With effort, he swallowed. “Where were we?”
“Mullah Salih Ahmad. Who hired you to kill him?”
“Ah, yes!” Through a twitch of pain, Roth seemed pleased that he could still find that memory. “Well, I didn’t know, did I? I have this contact, Jan Klausner, maybe Dutch, a red beard,” he said, unaware of his repetition. “He tells me nothing about who’s hiring him. He just pays the money, and that’s all right by me. But then there was the Ahmad job, and Jan’s master cheated me on the money. Only paid two-thirds. Klausner says it’s because I didn’t follow the instructions, which were to brand the body with some Chinese pictograms.”
“Chinese?” Milo cut in. “Why Chinese?”
“Good question, but no one tells me anything. Klausner just asks why I didn’t do this. After all, I did have a metalworker make the brands. Sadly, though, the Sudan is not overflowing with expert machinists, and what I got turned out to be made of aluminum. Can you imagine? When I heated them up, the pictograms just melted.” He coughed again, as if his body weren’t built for so many words at a time. “No Chinese—that was Klausner’s excuse for his master coming up short.” Another cough.
Milo reached into his jacket and took out a small flask. “Vodka.”
“Thanks.” The assassin took a long swig, which only made him cough more blood across his prison oranges, but he didn’t let go of the flask. He raised a finger until the coughs had trickled away, then said, “I better get it out quick, no?”
“What did the pictograms say?”
“Something like: As promised, the end. Weird, huh?”
Milo nodded.
“I could have let it go, and I considered that. But that’s bad business. If people find out I let one customer cheat me, then …” He wiped his bloodstained lips. “You understand.”
“Of course.”
Roth coughed again, less wretched this time. “Anyway, I thought for obvious reasons that it was the Chinese. They’ve invested billions into that country for oil; they supply the government with guns. They’d want to protect their investment. But then … yes. I saw the newspapers. Everyone believed the president had it done. He’d been harassing Ahmad for years. So I had it, right? There was Jan Klausner’s master, at least for this job.” He blinked a few times, and Milo feared he’d drift off again, but then he was back. “I’m an impulsive worker. In other men that spells defeat, but somewhere along the way I made it work for me. Half-second decisions are part of the job, don’t you think?”
Milo didn’t dispute the point.
“President al-Bashir, it turned out, was on a diplomatic trip to Cairo. So, impulsively, I flew there. Fancy villa, all the security out. But I’m the Tiger, right? I figure a way in. All the way in. I find him in his bedroom—alone, luckily. And I put the question to him: Omar, why are you stiffing me? But listen to me, Milo Weaver. After we’ve gone through about twenty minutes’ rigmarole, I realize he doesn’t know anything about this. Did he want Ahmad dead? Sure. The man was a pain in his ass. But did he actually order the killing?” Roth shook his head. “Sadly, no. So, like the wind, I’m gone.”
He took a sip of Milo’s vodka, letting it sit on his tongue before easing it down his throat. He looked at the flask. “Rus sian?”
“Swedish.”
“It’s nice.”
Again, Milo waited.
After another medicinal sip, Roth said, “I thought it through again and decided to search for Jan Klausner instead. I did some research—I know people, you see. People who can help. Turns out that Jan Klausner is registered in Paris, but under the name Herbert Williams, American. I went to his address, which is of course fake, but this, I believe, is where I took my wrong turn. I must have been spotted. A week later, Jan—or Herbert—he contacted me. It’s February by then. He asked me to come to Milan again to collect the rest of my money. His master had realized the error of his ways.”
“So you went,” said Milo, interested despite himself.
“Money is money. Or, it used to be.” That grin, weary now. “It went smoothly. We met in a café—February fourteenth—and he handed me a shopping bag full of euros. He also handed me, as an apology, a file on Milo Weaver, once known as Charles Alexander. Your nemesis, he tells me. This man has been after you for half a decade.” Roth frowned. “Why would he do that, Milo? Why would he give me your file? Any idea?”
“I have no idea.”
Roth bobbed his eyebrows at this mystery. “Only later, in Switzerland, once they told me the approximate time I got infected, did I remember what happened. You see, there were metal chairs at that café. Aluminum wire. Very pretty, but at some point during our coffee, I felt a little pinch from the chair. Here.” He touched the underside of his right thigh. “Poked through my pants, right into my leg. I thought it was just a lousy factory job, a little sliver of metal. It drew blood. Klausner,” he said, shaking his head at the memory, almost amused, “he got the waitress over and started bawling her out. He said his friend—meaning me—would sue them. Of course, the waitress was pretty—all Milano waitresses are—and I had to calm things down.”
“That’s how you think you got it?”
Roth shrugged with some effort. “How else? I’m sure you know from your file that I’m celibate and that I don’t shoot drugs.”
Milo considered not replying, but finally admitted, “The file on you is pretty thin.”
“Oh!” That seemed to please the assassin.
All this time, Milo had remained standing in the center of the room. By now, the position felt awkward, so he settled on the foot of the cot, by Roth’s feet. On the assassin’s upper lip a thin trail of snot glimmered. “Who do you think Klausner’s master is?”
Roth stared at him, thinking it over. “It’s hard to know. The jobs I got from him, they were inconsistent, just like your personal history. I’d always wondered this—does Mr. Klausner-Williams represent one group, or many groups? I’ve gone back and forth, finally deciding that he represents one group.” He paused, perhaps for dramatic effect. “The global Islamic jihad.”
Milo opened his mouth, then shut it. Then: “Does this bother you?”
“I’m an artisan, Milo. The only thing that concerns me is the feasibility of the job.”
“So, terrorists paid you to get rid of Mullah Salih Ahmad, one of their own. That’s what you’re saying?”
Roth nodded. “Public killings and private killings serve different purposes. You of all people know that. You don’t think al-Qaeda’s only technique is to pack little boys with bombs and send them off to a heaven of virgins, do you? No. And the Sudan—at first, I couldn’t see it either. Then I started watching. Who’s winning now? Ignore Darfur for the moment. I’m talking about the capital. Khartoum. The Muslim extremist insurgency, that’s who’s winning. They have public support like never before. Ahmad’s killing was about the best gift those bastards ever got, and with a Chinese brand on his body it would’ve been even better—blame it on the Chinese investors who prop up the president.” He shook his head. “They’ll have an Islamic paradise in no time, thanks to me.”
Judging from his features, no one would have been able to tell how much this news excited Milo. He’d asked all his questions in the quiet way of the interrogator, as if no answer were more important than another. In that same way, he said, “There’s something I don’t understand, Roth. You learned that, five months ago, you caught HIV. You learned it in a Swiss clinic. Now, it’s nearly killed you. Why aren’t you on antiretrovirals? You could live well enough for decades.”
It was Roth’s turn to look passive as he studied Milo’s face. “Milo, your file on me must be very small indeed.” Finally, he explained: “The Science of Christianity makes pure the fountain, in order topurify the stream.”
“Who said that?”
“Are you a man of faith, Milo? I mean, beyond the limits of your family.”
“No.”
Roth seemed to take that seriously, as if wondering whose path was better. “It’s a tough thing. Faith talks you into doing things you might not want to do.”
“Who were you quoting?”
“Mary Baker Eddy. I’m a Christian Scientist.” He swallowed again, roughly.
“I’m surprised,” Milo admitted.
“Sure you are, but why? How many Catholic gangsters are there? How many Muslim killers? How many Torah-loving angels of death? Please. I may not have lived up to the Church’s tenets, but I’ll certainly die by them. God has seen fit to strike me down—and why wouldn’t He? If I were Him, I would’ve done it years ago.” He paused. “Of course, those Swiss doctors, they thought I was nuts. Nearly forced me to take the treatments. They kept finding me outside, under a tree, on my knees, praying. The power of prayer—it didn’t save my body, but it just might save my soul.”
“What does Mary Baker Eddy say about revenge?” asked Milo, irritated by this sudden fit of moral poetry. He supposed it was what happened to killers like the Tiger, shut-ins who avoided even the intimacy of sex. There was no one to bounce your thoughts off of, no one to remind you that what came from your mouth wasn’t necessarily wisdom. He pressed: “That’s why you’re here, right? You want me to take revenge on the person who’s killing you.”
Roth thought a moment, raised a finger (Milo noticed blood on his knuckle), and intoned: “To suppose that sin, lust, hatred, envy, hypocrisy,revenge, have life abiding in them, is a terrible mistake. Life andLife’s idea, Truth and Truth’s idea, never make men sick, sinful, or mortal.” He lowered his hand. “Revenge does not have a life of its own, but maybe justice does. You understand? I’ve given you all I have on him. It’s not much, but you’re a smart man. You’ve got resources. I think you can track him down.”
“What about the money?” said Milo. “How did Klausner pass it on to you? Always in a shopping bag?”
“Oh, no,” said Roth, pleased that Milo was asking. “Usually I’d be directed to a bank. Go in and empty an account. The banks changed, each account was opened under a different name, but I was always put down as a coholder. Under the Roth name.”
Milo stared at the man. Given all the bodies Samuel Roth had collected over the years, there was something inappropriate about this last wish. “Maybe he’s done me a service. He’s closed a few of my cases by killing you. Maybe this Klausner is my friend.”
“No.” Roth was insistent. “I did that for you. I could’ve died in obscurity in Zürich. It was certainly more picturesque. This way, I help you out. Maybe you’ll help me out. You’re a Tourist. You can catch him.”
“I’m not a Tourist anymore.”
“That’s like saying, I’m not a murderer anymore. You can change your name, change your job description—you can even become a bourgeois family man, Milo. But really, nothing changes.”
Without realizing it, the Tiger had voiced one of Milo Weaver’s greatest fears. Before his apprehension could show, he changed the subject. “Does it hurt?”
“Very much. Here.” Roth touched his chest. “And here.” He touched his groin. “It’s like metal in the blood. You remember everything I’ve said?”
“Answer one question, will you?”
“If I can.”
It was something Milo had wondered for the last six years, ever since he’d decided to focus his efforts on the assassin whose bullets he’d once tried to face. He’d learned a lot about the Tiger, even backtracking to find his first verified assassination in November 1997, Albania. Adrian Murrani, the thirty-year-old chairman of the Sineballaj commune. Everyone knew Murrani had been ordered killed by the ruling neo-communists—it was a year of many sudden deaths in Albania—but in this case the gunman had been hired from abroad. Despite the stacks of physical and eyewitness evidence collected from the assassinations that followed, Milo had never come close to answering the most basic mystery about this man: “Who are you, really? We never found a real name. We didn’t even figure out your nationality.”
The Tiger smiled again, flushing. “I suppose that’s a kind of victory, isn’t it?”
Milo admitted that it was impressive.
“The answer is in your files. Somewhere in that tower facing the Avenue of the Americas. See, the only difference between you and me is that we chose different ways of tendering our resignations.”
Milo’s thoughts stuttered briefly before he understood. “You were a Tourist.”
“Brothers in arms,” he said, his smile huge. “And later, you’ll wish you’d asked another question. Know what it is?”
Milo, still spinning from the realization of Roth’s Company past, had no idea what the question could be. Then it occurred to him, because it was simple, and the assassin’s mood was so simple. “Why ‘the Tiger?’”
“Precisely! However, the truth is a disappointment: I have no idea. Someone, somewhere, first used it. Maybe a journalist, I don’t know. I guess that, after the Jackal, they needed an animal name.” He shrugged—again, it looked painful. “I suppose I should be pleased they didn’t choose a vulture, or a hedgehog. And no—before you think to ask, let me assure you I wasn’t named after the Survivor song.”
Despite everything, Milo smiled.
“Let me ask you something,” Roth said. “What’s your opinion on the Black Book?”
“The What Book?”
“Stop pretending, please.”
Within the subculture of Tourism, the Black Book was the closest thing to the Holy Grail. It was the secret guide to survival, rumored to have been planted by a retired Tourist, twenty-one copies hidden in locations around the world. The stories of the Black Book were as old as Tourism itself. “It’s bunk,” said Milo.
“We’re in agreement,” Roth answered. “When I first went freelance, I thought it might be useful, so I spent a couple years looking for it. It’s a figment of some overactive imaginations. Maybe Langley first spread it, maybe some bored Tourist. But it’s a nice idea.”
“You think so?”
“Sure. Something stable and direct in our befuddled world. A bible for living.”
“Luckily for you, you have the Bible itself.”
Roth nodded, and when he spoke again, his tone was earnest. “Please. You and me, we’re enemies—I understand that. But trust me: The man who did this to me is much worse than I am. You’ll at least look into it?”
“Okay,” said Milo, not sure how long his promise would last.
“Good.”
Samuel Roth hunched forward and lightly patted Milo’s knee, then leaned back against the wall. Without ceremony, he clenched his teeth. Something crunched in his mouth, like a nut, and Milo smelled the almond bitterness in Roth’s exhale. It was a smell he’d run into a few times in his life, from people either utterly devout or utterly frightened. The hard way out, or the easiest, depending on your philosophy.
The assassin’s veined eyes widened, close enough that Milo could see his own reflection in them. Roth seized up three times in quick succession, and Milo caught him before he fell off the cot. The yellow-tinted head rolled back, lips white with froth. Milo was holding a corpse.
He dropped the body on the cot, wiped his hands against his pants, and backed up to the door. It had been years since he’d faced this, but even back then, when he saw death more often, he’d never gotten used to it. The sudden heft. The fast cooling. The fluids that leaked from the body (there—Roth’s orange jumpsuit darkened at the groin). The quick cessation of consciousness, of everything that person—no matter how despicable or virtuous—had experienced. It didn’t matter that minutes ago he’d wanted to ridicule this man’s false piousness. That wasn’t the point. The point was that, within this concrete cell, a whole world had suddenly ceased to exist. In a snap, right in front of him. That was death.
Milo came out of his daze when the door against his back shook. He stepped away so Sheriff Wilcox could come in, saying, “Listen, I got some folks here who—”
He stopped.
“Christ,” the sheriff muttered. Fear stalled in his face. “What the hell’d you do to him?”
“He did it to himself. Cyanide.”
“But … but why?”
Milo shook his head and started for the door, wondering what Mary Baker Eddy said about suicide.
5 (#u091b7d02-b9dd-575e-8bcc-09ecba9ad902)
Special Agent Janet Simmons gazed at Milo across the scratched white table in the Blackdale interview room. Despite his size, her partner, Special Agent George Orbach, was clearly the inferior in their relationship. He kept getting up to leave the room, awkwardly returning with Styrofoam cups of water and coffee and lemonade.
Simmons had a fluid, engaging interview style, which Milo supposed was part of Homeland’s new training. She leaned forward a lot, hands open except when she pulled a strand of dark hair behind her ear. Early thirties, Milo guessed. Sharp, attractive features marred only by a right eye that wandered. The ways she positioned her beauty were supposed to close the psychological distance between interviewer and interviewee, making it less adversarial. She even pretended not to notice his stink.
After sending George Orbach out again to find milk for her coffee, she turned to him. “Come on, Milo. We’re on the same side here. Right?”
“Of course we are, Janet.”
“Then tell me why the Company’s working out of its jurisdiction on this one. Tell me why you’re keeping secrets from us.”
Mrs. Wilcox’s delicious lemonade was starting to give Milo a sugar high. “I’ve explained it,” he said. “We’ve been after Roth for years. We learned he’d crossed the border in Dallas, so I went to Dallas.”
“And you never thought to call us?” She arched her brow. “We do have a Dallas office, you know.”
Milo wondered how to put it. “I decided—”
“I? Tom Grainger no longer makes decisions in New York?”
“I advised,” he corrected, “that if Homeland Security were brought in, you’d send in the cavalry. The Tiger would spot it in a second, and go underground. The only way to track him was with a single person.”
“You.”
“I’ve followed his case a long time. I know his modus operandi.”
“And look how well that worked out.” Simmons winked—winked. “Another successful day for Central Intelligence!”
He refused to meet her challenge. “I think I’m being very helpful, Janet. I’ve told you that he had a cap of cyanide in his mouth. He didn’t like the idea of living in Gitmo, so he bit. You could blame Sheriff Wilcox for not giving him a cavity search, but I don’t think that would be fair.”
“He talked to you.” Her tone became gentle; her wandering eye came back in line. “You had a conversation. That deputy with the girl’s name—”
“Leslie.”
“Right. He said you had twenty minutes alone with him.”
“More like fifteen.”
“So?”
“Yes?”
Admirably, Simmons didn’t raise her voice. “So, what did you talk about?”
“A man like that, a superstar assassin—he needs more than fifteen minutes to start talking.”
“So you just sat there? Staring at each other?”
“I asked him questions.”
“Did you touch him?”
Milo cocked his head.
“Did you try to beat the information out of him, Milo?”
“Certainly not,” he said. “That’s against the law.”
She looked as if she were going to smile at that, but changed her mind. “You know what I think? I think you and the whole Company—you’re desperate. You’ve lost whatever shred of credibility you had left, and you’ll do anything to keep hold of your pensions. You’ll even kill for that.”
“It sounds like you’ve put some real thought into this.”
She let the smile appear this time; perhaps she thought he was joking. “Tell me what the Tiger had on you that was so damaging. Tom wasn’t running him, was he? For your dirty little jobs? I don’t know what you guys do in your tower, but I suspect it’s pretty nasty.”
Milo was surprised by her vehemence, but he was more surprised by her superiority. “I suppose Homeland doesn’t have any secrets?”
“Sure, but we’re not the ones on public trial. It’s not our time yet.”
George Orbach pushed his way into the room, clutching a handful of paper packets. “No milk. Just this powder.”
Janet Simmons seemed disgusted by the news. “Doesn’t matter,” she said, crossing her arms. “Mr. Weaver is leaving now. He’s in need of a good shower. I think we’ll have to talk to Mr. Grainger instead.”
Milo rapped the table with his knuckles and got up. “Please don’t hesitate to get in touch.”
“Fat lot of good that’ll do me.”
The morning storm had left as soon as it had arrived, leaving behind damp roads and moist, clean air. As he drove, Milo lit a Davidoff from the pack he’d broken down and bought when he filled up the tank. The smoke felt good, but then it didn’t, and he coughed hard, but kept smoking. Anything to cut the edge off the stink of death.
He hadn’t had his cell phone long enough to figure out how to change the ring tone, so when it woke up somewhere along Route 18 to Jackson, it played a stupid corporate melody. He checked to see if it was his wife, but it was Grainger. “Yeah?”
“Is what that bitch from Homeland says true? He’s dead?”
“Yeah.”
A pause. “Will I see you at the office today?”
“No.”
“I’ll catch you at the airport, then. We’ve got things to discuss.”
Milo hung up and turned on the radio, flipping through staticky country stations until, inevitably, he gave up and pulled out his iPod, which he’d listened to half this trip. He slipped in the earbuds, clicked the French playlist, and skipped to track five.
His head was filled with the quick, swirling melody of “Poupéede cire, poupée de son,” sung by France Gall, Luxembourg’s 1965 Eurovision winner, penned by Serge Gainsbourg. The very tune he’d taught Stephanie for her talent show, the performance he was missing.
He dialed Tina. Her voice mail picked up, and he listened to her story about not being in and the promise of a call if he left a message. He knew she was already at the show, next to an empty chair, watching their daughter sing Gainsbourg’s phenomenal hit. He didn’t leave a message. He’d just wanted to hear her voice.
6 (#u091b7d02-b9dd-575e-8bcc-09ecba9ad902)
Tina couldn’t figure out what kind of idiot parents would think to dress their seven-year-old girl in pink tights and a tank top, tie a pair of pink angel’s wings to her frail back, and then cover every inch with glistening sequins. You could hardly see the child from the spotlight’s reflection as she pranced left and right on the stage to some dance beat with electric guitars, singing a warbling version of “I Decide,” from (the principal had told everyone) “that hit Disney movie, The Princess Diaries2.” It might have been a good song, but from her seat near the center of the Berkeley Carroll School’s auditorium, Tina could only make out the thump of the bass drum and see a little glittering girl-shape shift around on that painfully bare stage.
But of course she clapped. They all did. Two stood and hooted—the idiot parents, Tina assumed. Beside her, in what should have been Milo’s seat, Patrick struck his palms together and whispered, “In-fucking-credible! I’m getting my friends at CAA to sign up this one, ASAP.”
Tina hadn’t wanted to call Patrick, but with Milo pulling another no-show, Stef deserved as full an audience as possible. “Be nice,” she said.
Milo had left another of his curt, unapologetic messages on their home phone, saying that there’d been a delay. As usual, he didn’t call the delay by any name, just “delay.”
Fine, she’d thought. Miss your daughter’s talent show, and I’ll bringher real father.
Then Milo himself had suggested calling Patrick. “For Stef. And videotape it, will you?”
That had taken some of the wind out of Tina’s anger—that, and the fact that, for the last three days, Patrick had been trying to get her and Stephanie to come back to him. Milo, off on his vague, sudden business trip, had no idea.
Her reaction to Patrick’s initial attempt had been to walk the phone to the kitchen so her daughter wouldn’t hear her say, “Are you on drugs, Patrick?”
“Of course not,” said her ex … boyfriend sounded silly, but they’d never actually married. “How could you even think that? You know how I feel about drugs.”
“I bet you’ve put away a few scotches.”
“Listen,” he said, trying to sound reasonable. “I look back now—I look back over all of it. I look back decades. What do I see? Two glowing years. The only two years I was really happy. With you. That’s what I want to tell you. It was never better than that.”
“I like Paula,” she told him as she absently rubbed a sponge around the spotted aluminum sink. “She’s a smart girl. Why she married you, I’ll never know…”
“Ha ha,” he said, and that’s when she knew he really was drunk. She heard him take a drag off of one of his stinking cigarillos. “I’m the joke of the century. But think about it. Think about me. Remember how in love we were.”
“Wait a minute. Where is Paula?”
Another long cigarillo-drag. “Your guess is as good as mine.”
That, then, had clarified everything. “She’s walked out on you. And after six years, you’re running back to me? You must be seriously drunk, Pat. Or seriously stupid.”
Onstage, a boy in a Superman outfit was delivering a monologue, a heavy lisp making the words hard to decipher. Patrick leaned close: “He’s gonna fly soon. I can see the string attached to his belt.”
“He’s not going to fly.”
“If he does, I’ll buy him his first martini.”
Patrick’s long face and graying three-day beard earned him extra clients at Berg & DeBurgh. They thought that he, unlike his over-the-hill law partners, looked vital. These days, though, with the bruised shade to his weary eyes, he looked more desperate than vital. Paula Chabon, that Lebanese-French bombshell who sold her own line of jewelry at little boutique shops positioned in many world capitals, had moved to Berlin. An ex-lover had wooed her back. More than anything, Patrick wanted to believe he could do the same thing, that he could woo Tina back. He really was pitiful.
Superboy ended his monologue by running around the stage in mock flight, but the cape hung sadly against his back, and Patrick was annoyed that his feet never left the ground. “Turn on the video,” Tina told him after the obligatory applause.
Patrick tugged a small Sony video camera out of his pocket. When he turned it on, the two-inch screen glowed.
Without thinking, Tina squeezed his knee. “Here comes Little Miss!”
But the Berkeley Carroll principal came on first, squinting at the card in her hand. “Please welcome our first grader Stephanie Weaver, as she performs …” The woman frowned, trying to make out the words. “Poop-ee de sirk, poop-ee de son.”
Titters rippled through the audience. Tina reddened. How could this bitch not have learned how to pronounce it first?
The principal snickered, too. “My French isn’t what it used to be. But, in English, this is, ‘Wax Doll, Sawdust Doll,’ written by Serge Gainsbourg.”
The crowd duly applauded, and as the principal left the stage Stephanie entered, walking flat but proud to the center. She was, without a doubt, the best dressed of the bunch. Milo had spent a whole weekend with Stephanie in the Village searching retro shops for the proper one-piece dress and tights. Then he’d scoured the Internet, discovering midsixties haircuts. Tina had found it all a bit much, and the idea of dressing their child in forty-year-old styles a little pompous—but now, seeing how the washed-out browns of the dress and the striped stockings glowed, just faintly, under the spotlights, and how her bobbed hair hung perfectly straight along the sides …
Beside her, watching their daughter, Patrick was speechless.
There was a click from the speakers, a CD spinning, and then an orchestral melody that grew into a wall of sound with a swift beat. Stephanie began to sing, those French words perfectly formed.
Je suis une poupée de cire,
Une poupée de son
When she couldn’t get her daughter in focus, Tina realized she was crying. Milo had been right all along. It was beautiful. She glanced at Patrick gaping at that little screen, muttering, “Wow.” Maybe this would finally convince him that Milo was A-OK, despite what he’d believed yesterday when he called her office, at Columbia’s Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library.
“I don’t like him.”
“What?” Tina had snapped back, already irritated. “What did you say?”
“Milo.” She could tell he was slipping into an afternoon buzz, maybe one of his famous five-martini lunches. “I’m talking about Milo Weaver. I never trusted him, not with you, and certainly not with my daughter.”
“You never even tried to like him.”
“But what do you know about him? He’s just some guy you met in Italy, right? Where’s he from?”
“You know all this. His parents died. He’s from—”
“North Carolina,” Patrick cut in. “Yeah, yeah. How come he’s got no southern accent?”
“He’s traveled more than you know.”
“Right. A traveler. And his orphanage—he told me it was the Saint Christopher Home for Boys. That place burned to the ground in 1989. Pretty conve nient, don’t you think?”
“I think it’s pretty conve nient you know this stuff, Pat. You’ve been snooping.”
“I’m allowed to snoop when the welfare of my daughter’s at stake.”
Tina tried to purge that conversation from her head, but it kept banging at her as Stephanie sang, her voice carrying crystal-clear through the auditorium. Tina didn’t even know what the song meant, but it was gorgeous.
“Look, Pat. I could bitch about how you left me when I was pregnant and needed you most, but I’m not angry about that anymore. The way things ended up … I’m happy. Milo treats us well; he loves Stephanie like his own. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
Stephanie’s pitch rose, the music swirling around her. She nearly bellowed the last lines, then fell silent. A final few bars of music, as Stephanie rocked in the same nonchalant dance she’d seen France Gall do in that Eurovision performance Milo tracked down on YouTube. She looked so cool, so hipper-than-thou.
Patrick repeated, “Wow.”
Tina whistled, standing and shouting, swinging her fist in the air, exhilarated. Some other parents stood and clapped, and Tina didn’t care if they were just being polite. She felt giddy all over. Milo really would’ve loved this.
7 (#u091b7d02-b9dd-575e-8bcc-09ecba9ad902)
It had been a lousy year and a half for the Company. No one could say exactly where the trail of bad luck had started, which meant that the blame leapfrogged up and down the hierarchy depending on the public mood, pausing to wreak havoc on this or that career. News cameras arrived to witness early retirements and awkward dismissals.
Before moving on, these humiliated unemployed dropped in on Sunday morning television roundtables to spread the blame further. It was the ex–assistant director, a soft-spoken career spook, now exceedingly bitter, who best summed up the general consensus.
“Iraq, of course. First, the president blames us for supplying bad information. He blames us for not killing Osama bin Laden before his big act of public relations. He blames us for uniting both of those failures into a disastrous, unending war, as if we pointed him to Iraq. We defend ourselves with facts—facts, mind you—and suddenly the president’s allies in Congress begin to pick us apart. What a coincidence! Special investigation committees. If you spend enough money and look hard enough, all organizations turn up dirty. That, too, is a fact.”
Georgia Republican Harlan Pleasance was the one who really dropped the bomb, back in April 2006. He headed the second special investigation committee, which, based on the results of the first committee the previous month, focused on money trails. With access to the CIA budget (a secret since the 1949 Central Intelligence Agency Act), Senator Pleasance wondered aloud how the Company could fund, for example, the recently uncovered ten-million-dollar gift to the unlikely named
, or Youth League, a militant Chinese democracy group based in the mountainous Guizhou province that had ironically named itself after the communist youth organization. It took less than three months for Senator Pleasance to report on CNN’s The Situation Room that the Chinese militants’ gift had come from part of the sale, in Frankfurt, of eighteen million euros’ worth of Afghan heroin, which had been clandestinely harvested by Taliban prisoners under U.S. Army guard. “And no one told us a thing about it, Wolf.”
It was an open secret within Langley that, while all this might be true, there was no human way to discover it from the existing paper trails. Another agency was feeding Senator Pleasance his information. Most believed it was Homeland, while others—and Milo was part of this group—believed it was the National Security Agency, which had a much older, historic beef with the CIA. It didn’t matter, though, because the public didn’t care where the information came from. The facts were just too enticing.
Whatever began the steady bloodletting, it was Pleasance’s discovery that turned it into a public, and international, massacre. First, the embarrassed Germans rolled back their historic support and shut down many joint operations. Then it became a race. Fresh special committees demanded financial records as minor politicians took a stab at national recognition, while Langley began incinerating hard drives. Louise Walker, a typist, was arrested for this, and after a lengthy meeting with her lawyer became convinced that the only way out was to give a name. That name was Harold Underwood, a low-level bureaucrat. Harold was also assigned a convincing lawyer.
So it went. Eighteen months from beginning to end, resulting in thirty-two arrests: seventeen acquittals, twelve jail terms, two suicides, and one disappearance. The new CIA director, whose approval was rushed through the nomination hearings, was a tiny but vociferous Texan named Quentin Ascot. In front of the Senate, on elevated heels, he made his position clear. No more black money. No more operations that hadn’t been approved by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. No more cowboy antics at Langley. “No more rogue departments. It’s a new world. We serve at the pleasure of the American people, who pay our bills. We should be an open book.”
The Company’s collective groan could be heard around the world.
The four secret floors of offices on the Avenue of the Americas, stocked with Travel Agents who focused on the running of, and assimilation of information collected by, Tourists based in all the populated continents, was (behind closed doors) considered a prime target for the inevitable cuts. Director Ascot, it was rumored, wanted to relieve the world of Tourism altogether. He claimed that Tourists, with open-ended resources and no need to collect receipts, would bankrupt the Company. But since he didn’t have enough internal support to erase the clandestine department, all he could do was slowly chew it up.
Milo learned of Ascot’s first tentative steps when he arrived at LaGuardia from Tennessee and met Tom Grainger in the airport security office. The old man had sent away the “rent-a-cops,” as he called most non-Company personnel, and through a two-way mirror they watched crowds jostling at the luggage carousel, the irregular flow of travelers along mass transit lines that had in recent years become national threat centers. Both men missed that almost-forgotten time when travel was about arriving someplace new, not about getting through the clunky measures of antiterrorist law.
“They’re starting the postmassacre frenzy,” Grainger said to the glass, a drawn look on his face.
Even by CIA standards, Tom Grainger was old—seventy-one years, most of his white hair lost to the shower drain, his cabinet full of prescription pills. He never appeared in public without a tie.
“The Grand Inquisitor has sent a memo through his under-lings—through Terence Fitzhugh, to be precise. I’m to prepare for executions, he says. Ascot’s predicting a war of attrition, and he’s getting me to take out my own people. It’s slow hara-kiri.”
Milo had known Grainger since 1990, when he’d been invited to become part of the Company’s clandestine world in London, and he knew the old man was always melodramatic when it came to Langley. His secret department in Manhattan was his private dominion, and it hurt him to be reminded that people in another state really pulled the strings. Maybe that was why he’d decided to appear at the airport, rather than wait for morning to talk in the office—no one here could listen to his bitching. “You’ve been through worse, Tom. We’ve all been through worse.”
“Hardly,” Grainger said dismissively. “One-quarter. That’s how much we’re losing. He’s giving me the heads-up. Next year we’ll work on one-quarter less funds, which’ll barely cover operational costs. I’m supposed to decide which Travel Agents get pink slips, and which get transferred to more public departments.”
“And the Tourists?”
“Aha! Too many. That’s the gist of it. Twelve slots for the whole of Europe, working around the clock, and yet I’m supposed to get rid of three of them. Bastard. Who does he think he is?”
“Your boss.”
“My boss wasn’t there when the planes came, was he?” The old man rapped a knuckle on the glass. A boy standing nearby turned to frown at the noisy mirror. “I guess you weren’t either, were you? You never did visit the old office … no.” He was fully engaged in his memories now. “You were still a Tourist, just barely, and we were sitting at our desks, drinking Starbucks, as if the world wasn’t preparing to explode.”
Milo had heard all this before, Grainger’s endless replay of September 11, when the former secret CIA office at 7 World Trade Center collapsed. It didn’t happen immediately, because the nineteen young men who hijacked four planes that morning didn’t realize that by hitting one of the smaller towers they could wipe out an entire Company department. Instead, they went for the glory of the enormous first and second towers, which gave Grainger and his staff time to flee in panic before the main targets crumbled, bringing number seven down with them.
“It was Beirut times fifty,” said Grainger. “All of Dresden stuffed into a few minutes. It was the first wave of barbarians coming to sack Rome.”
“It wasn’t any of those things. Is this what you needed to talk to me about?”
Grainger turned from the glass and frowned. “You’re sunburned.”
Milo leaned against the LaGuardia security supervisor’s messy desk and looked down. His left arm, which had hung out the driver’s side window, was definitely a different tone. “You want to just wait for my report?”
“They’ve been calling like mad,” said Grainger, ignoring the question. “Who’s this Simmons bitch?”
“She’s all right. Just angry. I would be, too.”
Through the window, luggage clattered down a conveyor belt as Milo outlined his conversation with the Tiger. “He wanted me to track down the people who stuck him with HIV. Terrorists, he thinks. Sudan connections.”
“Sudan. Great. But all he had for you was this one name. Herbert Williams. Or Jan Klausner. It’s pretty sketchy.”
“And the Hirslanden Clinic. He was there under the al-Abari alias.”
“We’ll look into it.”
Milo chewed the inside of his cheek. “Send Tripplehorn. He’s still in Nice, isn’t he?”
“You’re better than Tripplehorn,” said Grainger.
“I’m not a Tourist. Besides, I’m due in Florida on Monday.”
“Sure.”
“Really,” said Milo. “Me, the family, and Mickey Mouse.”
“So you keep telling me.”
They watched passengers press closer to the carousel, knocking into each other in an exhausted panic. To Milo’s annoyance, his boss sighed loudly. He knew what that meant, and that knowledge told him why Grainger had taken the trouble to come out to LaGuardia—he wanted to railroad Milo into another trip. “No, Tom.”
Grainger peered at the travelers, not bothering to reply. Milo would wait him out. He would stay silent, not even pass on the revelation that the Tiger had come from the ranks of their own Tourists. If it was true, Tom already knew it, and had kept this information from Milo for his own reasons.
Almost sadly, Grainger said, “Think you can head out tomorrow afternoon?”
“Absolutely not.”
“Ask me where.”
“Doesn’t matter. Tina’s on the warpath. I missed Stephanie’s show.”
“Not to worry. I called an hour ago with a personal apology for sending you out. I took the responsibility on my own shoulders.”
“You’re a real saint.”
“Sure I am. I informed her that you were saving the free world.”
“She stopped believing that long ago.”
“Librarians.” Grainger sniffed at the travelers. “You should’ve listened to me. There are absolutely no odds in marrying smart women.”
Truth was, Grainger actually had given him this advice a week before he and Tina married. It had always made him wonder about Terri, Grainger’s now-deceased wife. “Might as well tell me about it,” he said. “But no promises.”
Grainger patted his back with a heavy hand. “See? That wasn’t so hard.”
8 (#u091b7d02-b9dd-575e-8bcc-09ecba9ad902)
It took them most of the sunset hour to reach Park Slope, the Brooklyn neighborhood Milo had grown to love over the last five years. When they were apartment hunting, Stephanie still just a baby, Tina had been immediately taken by the brownstones and upscale cafés, the cozy, soft-edged world of dot-com kids and successful novelists; it took Milo a while longer.
Family life was a different beast from what he’d known before—unlike Tourism, it actually was life. So he learned. First, to accept, and after acceptance came affection. Because the Slope wasn’t about the nouveau riche torturing café workers with elaborate nonfat coffee specifications; Park Slope was about Milo Weaver’s family.
The Tiger had called him a bourgeois family man. In that, at least, the assassin had been right on the mark.
At Garfield Place, he climbed out of Grainger’s Mercedes with a promise to talk the next morning in the office. But he knew, as he mounted the narrow interior stairs of their brownstone, that he had already made up his mind. Family man or not, he was going to Paris.
At the third floor, he heard a television. When he rang the bell Stephanie shouted, “Door! Mom, door!” Then Tina’s quick footsteps and, “Coming.” When she opened it, she was buttoning her shirt. Once she had him focused, she crossed her arms over her breasts and in a high whisper said, “You missed her show.”
“Didn’t Tom talk to you?”
He tried to come in, but she wouldn’t step out of the way. “That man will say anything to cover for you.”
It was true, so he didn’t dispute it. He just waited for her to make up her mind. When she did, she grabbed his shirt, pulled him close, and kissed him fully on the lips. “You’re still in the dog house, mister.”
“Can I come in?”
Tina wasn’t truly angry. She came from a family where you didn’t hide your anger, because by venting it you stole its power. That’s how the Crowes had always done it in Austin, and what was good enough for Texas was good enough for anywhere.
He found Stephanie in the living room, splayed on the floor with a pile of dolls, while on television cartoon animals got into trouble. “Hey, girl,” he told her. “Sorry I missed the show.”
She didn’t get up. “I’m used to it by now.”
She sounded more like her mother every day. When he leaned over and kissed her head, she wrinkled her nose.
“Dad, you stink.”
“I know, hon. Sorry.”
Tina threw a tube of moisturizing cream at Milo. “For that sunburn. Want a beer?”
“Any vodka?”
“Let’s get some food in you first.”
Tina boiled ramen noodles—one of the five things, by her own admission, that she knew how to cook—and brought out the bowl. By then, Stephanie had warmed to Milo’s presence and climbed up beside him on the sofa. She gave a rundown of the other performers at the talent show, their relative strengths and weaknesses, and the utter injustice of the winning performance—Sarah Lawton’s rendition of “I Decide.”
“But what about yours? We worked on it for weeks.”
Stephanie tilted her head forward to glower at him. “It was a stupid idea.”
“Why?”
“Because, Dad. No one understands French.”
Milo rubbed his forehead. He’d thought it was a fine idea, his child performing a Serge Gainsbourg hit. It was unexpected. Innovative. “I thought you liked that song.”
“Yeah.”
Tina took the far end of the couch. “She was incredible, Milo. Just stunning.”
“But I didn’t win.”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “One day you’ll be running the New York Philharmonic, and Sarah Lawton will be serving up fries at Fuddruckers.”
“Milo,” warned Tina.
“I’m just saying.”
A crooked smile filled Stephanie’s face as she gazed into the distance. “Yeah.”
Milo dug into his noodles. “We’ve got it on video, right?”
“Father couldn’t get it in focus. And I’m too small.” That was how Stephanie differentiated the men in her life: Patrick was Father; Milo was Dad.
“He told you he was sorry,” said Tina.
Stephanie, not in a forgiving mood, climbed to the floor to rejoin her dolls.
“So?” said Tina. “You going to tell me?”
“This is good,” Milo said through a mouthful of noodles.
“Where?”
“Where what?”
“Tom’s sending you off again. That’s why he called—to soften me up. He’s the least subtle CIA man I’ve ever met.”
“Now, wait—”
“Also,” she cut in, “I can see the guilt all over your face.”
Milo peered over his bowl at the television. The Road Runner was defying gravity once again, as Wile E. Coyote suffered the fate of the rest of us, the ones chained to the laws of physics. Quietly, he said, “I need to go to Paris. But I’ll be back by Saturday.”
“You don’t do that kind of work anymore.”
He didn’t answer. She was right, of course, but over the last year he’d disappeared on more and more “business trips,” and Tina’s worries had found voice. She knew enough about his life before they met to know that that man wasn’t the kind of husband she’d signed up for. She’d signed on with the person who’d left all of that behind.
“Why’s it so important you go to Paris? It’s not like the Company doesn’t have a whole army of goons to send.”
He lowered his voice: “It’s Angela Yates. She’s got herself in some real trouble.”
“Angela? From-our-wedding Angela?”
“They think she’s selling information.”
“Come on.” She made a face. “Angela’s the poster girl for Us-Against-Them. She’s more patriotic than John Wayne.”
“That’s why I need to go,” said Milo, looking up as Wile E. Coyote climbed out of a sooty hole after having plummeted a mile. “Those internal investigation guys—they won’t take that into consideration.”
“Okay. But you’re back by Saturday. We will fly to Disney World without you. Isn’t that right, Little Miss?”
“For sure,” Stephanie said to the television.
Milo held up his hands. “Promise.”
Tina rubbed his knee, and he pulled her close, smelling her freshly washed hair as he gazed at the television. That’s when he realized he’d been wrong: Wile E. Coyote wasn’t subject to the same laws of physics as the rest of us. Against all odds, he always survived.
Tina sniffed, then pushed him away. “Jesus, Milo. You stink.”
9 (#u091b7d02-b9dd-575e-8bcc-09ecba9ad902)
To visit the tower at the intersection of West Thirty-first and the Avenue of the Americas, you first had to know that you were being tracked by cameras that covered every inch of sidewalk and road around the building. So by the time you entered, you were expected, and Gloria Martinez, the dour forty-year-old Company desk clerk, was ready with your ID. Milo made a sport of flirting with Gloria, and she in turn made a sport of rebuffing him. She knew his wife was, as she put it, half-Latina, and because of this she occasionally thought it important to remind him, “Watch out, and keep sharp things away from your bed.”
Milo accepted this wisdom along with the breast-pocket ID, smiled for the camera attached to her terminal, and promised her, for the third time, “a secret vacation in Palm Springs.” In reply, she drew a cutting finger across her neck.
At the next stage of entry, by the six-pack of elevators, stood three enormous football players they called doormen. These men held the keys that allowed access to the four secret floors, stretching from nineteen to twenty-two, that constituted Tom Grainger’s domain. On this day, Lawrence, a tall, hairless black man, took him up. Even after five years of the same daily grind, Lawrence still waved a metal detector over Milo’s body in the elevator. It bleeped around his hip, and, like every day, Milo pulled out his keys, phone, and loose change for examination.
They passed the nineteenth floor, that eerily sterile interview level of narrow corridors and numbered doors where, when necessary, the Geneva Convention became a joke. The twentieth was empty, set aside for future expansion, and twenty-one contained the extensive library of printed Tourism files, a backup of the computer originals. The doors finally opened on the twenty-second floor.
Were a visitor to accidentally reach the Department of Tourism, he would find nothing out of the ordinary. It was an enormous open-plan office, stuffed with low-walled cubicles where pale Travel Agents hunched over computers, digging through mountains of information in order to write up their biweekly reports—or, in the vernacular, Tour Guides—for Tom Grainger. It had the feel, Milo always thought, of a Dickensian accounting office.
Before 9/11 and the collapse of the previous office at 7 World Trade Center, the Department of Tourism had been divided along geographic lines. Six sections devoted to six continents. Afterward, as this new office was put together and all the intelligence agencies were being scrutinized, Tourism rearranged itself along thematic lines. At present, there were seven sections. Milo’s section focused on terrorism and organized crime, and the many points at which they intersected.
Each section employed nine Travel Agents and one supervisor, giving the Avenue of the Americas (not counting an undisclosed number of Tourists spread around the globe) a staff of seventy-one, including its director, Tom Grainger.
One-quarter, Grainger had said. One-quarter of these people would have to go.
The old man was in a meeting with Terence Fitzhugh, Langley’s assistant director of clandestine operations, who sometimes arrived unexpectedly to address aspects of Grainger’s incompetence. While Milo waited outside the office, Harry Lynch, a twenty-something Travel Agent from Milo’s section, frog-marched a bundle of laser-printed sheets down the hall, stopping when he noticed Milo. “How’d it go?”
Milo blinked at him. “How’d what go?”
“Tennessee. I caught the radio traffic late Tuesday, and I knew—I knew—that this was our guy. It took a while to verify, but I had a feeling in my spine.”
Lynch felt a lot of things in his spine, a gift Milo was suspicious of. “Your backbone was right, Harry. Great job.”
Lynch glowed with pleasure and ran back to his cubicle.
Grainger’s door opened, and Fitzhugh stepped out. He towered over Grainger as he pointed at Milo with a manila envelope. “Weaver, right?” Milo admitted this was fact, and complimented his long memory—they hadn’t spoken in half a year, and then only briefly. In a show of comradely affection, Fitzhugh slapped Milo’s shoulder. “Too bad about the Tiger, but you just can’t predict these things, can you?”
Grainger, behind him, was noticeably silent.
“But we’re rid of one more terrorist,” Fitzhugh continued, stroking the thick silver hair above his ear. “That scores one for the good guys.”
Dutifully, Milo agreed with the sporting metaphor.
“So, what’s on your plate now?”
“Just Paris.”
“Paris?” Fitzhugh echoed, and Milo noticed a flicker of apprehension in his features. He turned to Grainger. “You got the budget to send this guy to Paris, Tom?”
“It’s Yates,” Grainger informed him.
“Yates?” Fitzhugh repeated again; perhaps he was hard of hearing.
“She’s one of his oldest friends. It’s the only sure way of pulling this off.”
“Gotcha,” Fitzhugh said, then patted Milo’s arm and walked away, singing, “Oo-la-la!”
“Get in here,” said Grainger.
The old man returned to his Aeron, settling against the bright backdrop of Manhattan, and placed an ankle on the corner of his broad desk. He did that a lot, as if to remind visitors whose office this really was.
“What did he want?” Milo asked as he took a seat.
“Like I told you, they’re reaming me over the budget, and then you go and mention Paris.”
“Sorry.”
Grainger waved the problem away. “One thing before we get into this. Your new friend, Simmons, has apparently done a rush-job autopsy on the Tiger. She wants to prove you killed him. You didn’t give her any reason to think that, did you?”
“I thought I was very cooperative. How did you hear about the autopsy?”
“Sal. Our friend at Homeland.”
Grainger wasn’t the only one with a friend in Homeland Security. Milo remembered the hubbub over the president’s announcement, nine days after the Towers, that he was establishing a new intelligence agency. The Company, the Feds, and the NSA lined up to squeeze in as many of their own employees as possible. “Sal” was Tourism’s plant, and periodically Grainger talked with him through an anonymous e-mail service called Nexcel. Milo had used it a few times himself.
“As you suspected,” Grainger continued, “it was cyanide. Hollow tooth. According to Homeland’s doctor, he only had a week or so left to him anyway. However, your prints are all over his face. Want to explain?”
“At the beginning of the interview, I attacked him.”
“Why?”
“I told you before—he brought up Tina and Stef.”
“You lost your cool.”
“I was short on sleep.”
“Okay.” Grainger reached out to tap the oak desktop, referring Milo to an unmarked gray file in the center. “Here’s the Angela thing. Go ahead.”
Milo had to get out of his chair to retrieve the dull-looking folder that showed off the newest Company security technique: Top secret files were now left unmarked, to better avoid attracting interest. He left it closed in his lap. “What about the Swiss clinic?”
Grainger pursed his wide lips. “As he said. Registered under Hamad al-Abari.”
“So you’ll put Tripplehorn on it?”
“We’ve only got eleven Tourists in Europe right now. Elliot died last week near Bern. The rest, including Tripplehorn, are all occupied.”
“Elliot? How?”
“Accident on the Autobahn. He’d been off the grid a week before we finally matched him up with the body.”
Because of security, Milo didn’t know any of the Tourists’ real names, their ages, or even what they looked like—only Grainger and a few others, including Fitzhugh, had that level of clearance. The news of Elliot’s death still bothered him. He scratched his ear, wondering about the man he only knew through a code name. How old was he? Did he have children? “You’re sure it was accidental?”
“Even if I wasn’t, I doubt we’d get the money for a proper investigation. That’s the level of purgatory we’ve entered.” When he saw the doubt in Milo’s face, his tone softened. “No, Milo. It was an accident. Head-on, and the other driver was killed, too.”
Milo finally opened the file. A couple of sheets of printed facts and a photograph—a mug shot of a fat Chinese man in a People’s Liberation Army colonel’s uniform.
“The Brits discovered it,” Grainger said. “Well, ‘discover’ is a strong word. They were lucky bastards. All routine, apparently. Six was keeping an eye on the opposition.”
In Milo’s experience, MI6 didn’t have the manpower to keep an eye on each foreign diplomat in the country, even ones as important as the one in this photo—Colonel Yi Lien—but he didn’t interrupt.
“The trip wasn’t strange. The colonel took the ferry over to France every weekend.”
“No Chunnel?”
“Fear of closed spaces—that’s in his file. So he does the ferry, then drives on to a little cottage he’s got in the Brittany countryside.”
“Bought under his name?”
Grainger reached for his computer’s mouse, but he was sitting too far back and had to drop his foot in order to reach it. “Of course not. Under a …” He clicked twice and squinted at the screen. “Yes. Renée Bernier. Twenty-six, from Paris.”
“Mistress.”
“Budding novelist, it says here.” Another click. “She uses the place to write, I suppose.”
“And meet with the colonel.”
“Everybody’s got to pay rent.”
“Walk me through this,” said Milo. “Colonel Yi Lien takes the ferry over to his French chalet. Spends the weekend with his girl. Then he boards the ferry. And drops dead?”
“Not dead. Heart attack.”
“And MI6 is there to resuscitate him.”
“Of course.”
“And they go through his bag.”
“What’s with the attitude, Milo?”
“Sorry, Tom. Go on.”
“Well, the colonel’s a paranoid sort. Doesn’t trust anyone in his own embassy, and for good reason. He’s sixty-four, unmarried, with a declining career. He knows that pretty soon someone’s going to suggest it’s time to pack up for Beijing, and he doesn’t want that. He likes London. He likes France.”
“And why wouldn’t he?”
“Right. But since he trusts no one, he keeps his laptop with him at all times. Big security risk. So our friends in MI6 took the opportunity, on the ferry, to copy his hard drive.”
“Very resourceful.”
“Aren’t they?” Grainger clicked his mouse again, and his printer, buried in the bookshelf alongside a row of untouched antiquarian books, hummed as it spat out a page.
“And Colonel Lien? What happened to him?”
“Irony of ironies. He was recalled to Beijing not long after the heart attack.”
Since Grainger wasn’t going anywhere, Milo retrieved the printout.
It was an interoffice memo from the U.S. embassy in Paris, top secret. A relay from the ambassador to Frank Barnes, the head of the Diplomatic Security Service in France, concerning new guidelines in dealing with the Chinese ambassador to France, who would temporarily be monitored by a three-man team.
“And Six just shared this with us for free?”
“They’re our special friends,” he said, smiling. “Actually, one of my personal special friends passed this on to me.”
“Does your special friend think Angela passed this on to Lien? Is that what Six thinks?”
“Calm down, Milo. All they did was pass on the memo. The rest, we figured out on our own.”
Like Tina, Milo still couldn’t believe that Angela Yates, “poster girl for Us-Against-Them,” would give away state secrets. “Has this been verified? The ferry; the heart attack?”
“Like I told you yesterday,” Grainger said with theatrical patience, “Yi Lien’s coronary made the British papers. It’s public record.”
Milo dropped the memo on Grainger’s desk. “So what’s the evidence?”
“That paper went through three sets of hands. The ambassador and Frank Barnes, of course. And the embassy’s chief of security. That would be Angela Yates. We’ve cleared Barnes, and I hope you won’t demand an exegesis of the ambassador.”
He’d already listened to this overview yesterday in Grainger’s car. But now, the physical reality of the memo was making him queasy.
“When was the last time you saw Yates?”
“About a year. But we’ve kept in touch.”
“So you’re still on good terms?”
Milo shrugged, then nodded.
“Good.” Grainger looked at his mouse—it was a bulbous thing with a blue-lit scroll wheel. “Did you and she ever …?”
“No.”
“Oh.” He sounded disappointed. “Doesn’t matter. I want you to give her this.” He opened a drawer and took out a black, thumb-sized flash drive, five hundred megabytes. It clattered on Milo’s side of the desk.
“What’s on it?”
“A mock-up report on Chinese oil concerns in Kazakhstan. The kind of thing they’ll want to see.”
“I don’t know, Tom. You may have cleared Barnes, but you still haven’t convinced me Angela’s to blame.”
“It’s not your job to be convinced,” Grainger told him. “You’ll find out more from your contact. Trust me, there is evidence.”
“But if Yi Lien’s gone, then …”
“Networks always survive recalls, Milo. You know that. What we don’t know is who’s at the top of the food chain now.”
Milo looked at Grainger’s hairless scalp, thinking this over. It was a simple enough matter, and he was glad to be brought in; he could at least make sure they dealt fairly with Angela. But the Company didn’t work like that—it didn’t buy international air tickets because it felt like being fair. He was being brought in because Angela trusted him. “How long will it take?”
“Oh, not long,” Grainger said, pleased the subject had changed. “You fly there, meet her, and hand over the drive. The story is that she’ll hold it for a contact named Jim Harrington who’ll arrive in Paris on Monday to pick it up. That’ll give her”—he raised his hands— “if, of course, it is her—only two days to copy it.”
“Is Harrington real?”
“He’s flying to Paris from Beirut. He knows what to do, but he doesn’t know why.”
“I see.”
“You’ll get it done in no time. Hop an evening flight and be back home by Saturday morning.”
“That’s encouraging.”
“Don’t be sarcastic.”
Milo knew why he was annoyed. It wasn’t that he’d missed his coffee that morning, nor that he was feeling an acute desire for a cigarette. It wasn’t even the miserable fact that he was preparing to set up a friend for treason—that only made him sick. He said, “When were you planning to tell me about the Tiger?”
Grainger, looking very innocent, said, “What about him?”
“That he was one of ours. That he was a Tourist.”
The old man’s expression lost its innocence. “You believe that?”
“I’ve spent the last six years tracking him. Don’t you think this piece of information might have helped?”
Grainger stared at him for about ten seconds, then rapped his knuckles on the desk. “Let’s talk when you get back. Okay? We don’t have time for it now.”
“The story’s really that long?”
“It is. Your plane leaves at five, and you need to type up some explanation of the Blackdale fiasco that doesn’t make us look like complete idiots. Also, put in all your receipts—I’m not paying for undocumented expenses anymore.”
Milo grunted an affirmative.
“I’ll tell James Einner to expect you. He’s your liaison in Paris.”
“Einner?” said Milo, suddenly awake. “You really think we need a Tourist for this?”
“Overkill never killed anyone,” Grainger said. “Now go. Everything’s been forwarded to your terminal.”
“And the Tiger?”
“As I said. When you get back.”
10 (#u091b7d02-b9dd-575e-8bcc-09ecba9ad902)
Milo had always felt comfortable in large airports. It wasn’t that he loved to fly—that, particularly after the Towers, had become an increasingly unbearable experience with its various secure levels of undress. The only things he enjoyed forty thousand feet above sea level were the cleverly packaged airline meals and the day’s music choices on his iPod.
Once he was on the ground again, though, in a properly designed airport, he always felt that he was wandering through a tiny city. Charles de Gaulle, for instance, was properly designed. Its striking sixties architecture—what designers in the sixties imagined a beautiful future would look like—made for a strangely nostalgic utopia of crowd control architecture and consumer pleasures, reinforced by the soft ding over loudspeakers followed by a lovely female voice listing the cities of the world.
Nostalgia was a good word for it, a false nostalgia for a time he was too young to know. It was why he loved Eurovision winners from 1965, the unreal Technicolor of those midcareer Bing Crosby films, and (despite his promises to the contrary) the perfect pair of a Davidoff cigarette and a bracing vodka, served at an airport bar.
He hadn’t wandered Charles de Gaulle in years, and he soon realized things had changed. He passed a McDonald’s and some bakeries, settling on the vaguely precious La Terrasse de Paris. There was no bar, instead a cafeteria-style area where he searched in vain for vodka. The only things available were small wines—red and white. Frustrated, he settled on four deciliters of some chilled mass-market Cabernet that cost nine euros. His plastic cup, the cashier told him, was complimentary.
Milo found an empty table by the rear wall, bumping into backs and luggage on the way, and settled down. Six in the morning, and the place was packed. His cell phone sang its irritating song, and it took him a moment to find the thing in his inner pocket. PRIVATE NUMBER. “Yeah?”
“Milo Weaver?” said a thin, wiry voice.
“Uh huh.”
“Einner. You landed all right?”
“Well, yes, I—”
“New York tells me you’ve got the package. Do you?”
“I hope so.”
“Answer yes or no, please.”
“Sure.”
“The subject takes lunch every day at twelve thirty precisely. I suggest you wait for her outside her place of work.”
Feeling more desperate for his nostalgic interlude, Milo looked for an ashtray; there was none. He tapped out a Tennessee-bought Davidoff, deciding to ash into the cup and drink the wine from the bottle. “That’ll give me time to nap. It was a long flight.”
“Oh, right,” said Einner. “I forgot how old you are.”
Milo was too stunned to say what his mind muttered: I’m onlythirty-seven.
“Don’t worry, Weaver. We’ll have you out of here in time for your vacation. I don’t even know why they bothered flying you in.”
“We done?”
“I understand the subject is an old friend of yours.”
“Yes.” Milo took a drag, losing his grip on his sense of humor, while someone nearby coughed loudly.
“Don’t let that get in the way.”
Milo suppressed the urge to shout a reply. Instead, he hung up as, a few seats away, a young man started a coughing fit into his hand, glaring at him.
Milo suddenly realized why. Round eyes watched him tap ash into his plastic cup, and he waited for the hammer to fall. It was swift—the cashier, having noticed the crime in action, called over a stock boy who had been crouched by the canned coffee mixtures, and he followed her pointed finger to Milo’s corner. The boy, eighteen or so, wiped his hands on his orange apron as he weaved expertly between tables toward him. “Monsieur, ici vous ne pouvez pas fumer.”
Milo considered standing his ground, then noticed the big sign with the symbol for no smoking on the wall, a few feet from him. He raised his hands, smiling, took one last drag, and dropped the cigarette into the plastic cup. He poured in some of the wretched wine to extinguish it. The stock boy, behind a bashful grin, was relieved not to have to throw this man out.
Grainger had booked him into the Hotel Bradford Elysées, one of those classical, overpriced monstrosities along the Rue Saint-Philippe du Roule that, were anyone to ever audit the books of the Department of Tourism, would be the first thing to go. He asked the front desk for a wake-up call at eleven thirty—about four hours from then—and picked up a Herald Tribune. In the ornate Bradford Elysées elevator, he read headlines. They weren’t pretty.
More car bombs in Iraq, killing eight U.S. and Canadian soldiers, and more riots in Khartoum, Sudan: a photo of a full square of angry men—thousands—waving placard photographs of the dead Mullah Salih Ahmad, a white-bearded holy man with a white taqiyah covering his bald scalp. Other signs in Arabic, the caption told him, called for the head of President Omar al-Bashir. On page eight, he found a single-paragraph story saying that Homeland Security had apprehended a suspected political assassin, whom they refused to name.
Yet the most important news was unwritten: Milo Weaver had arrived in Paris to set up one of his oldest friends.
Mawkishly, he remembered when both of them were young field agents in London. Lots of codes and clandestine meetings in out-of-the-way pubs and arguments with British intelligence about the mess their countries were just starting to make of the postcommunist world. Angela was smart and stable—a near-contradiction in their business—and she had a sense of humor. In intelligence, those three things together are so rare that when you find them, you don’t let go. Given the amount of time they spent together, everyone assumed they were a couple. This served them both. It kept her homosexuality out of conversations, and saved Milo from diplomats’ wives setting him up with their nieces.
For two months after the Venice fiasco, Angela couldn’t speak to him—that’s how much killing her boss, Frank Dawdle, had disturbed her. But the next year, when Milo became simultaneously a husband and a dad to a baby girl, Angela came to the wedding in Texas and showered happy praise on Tina. They had remained in touch, and when Angela came to town Tina always insisted they take her out to dinner.
He lay on the hotel bed without undressing and considered calling Tom. What to say? He’d already argued Angela’s innocence. Should he report that James Einner was a dunce, unequipped to handle the operation? Tom didn’t care what Milo thought of Einner.
The truth—and for a moment it disturbed him—was that, six years ago, as a Tourist, he never would have questioned any of this. The job would have been simple and clean. But he wasn’t a Tourist anymore, and for that he had no regrets.
11 (#u091b7d02-b9dd-575e-8bcc-09ecba9ad902)
The American embassy was separated from the Champs-Elysées by the long, rigorous Jardin des Champs-Elysées. He parked along Avenue Franklin D. Roosevelt and walked the length of the park, passing old Parisians on benches with bags of bread crumbs dangling between their knees, luring pigeons, while the midday sun burned hot and moist.
Paris in July is a bleak place to be. The locals have started to flee on their welfare-state vacations, and in their place Japanese, Dutch, Americans, Germans, and Brits stand in lines leading to ticket counters, their necks craned, waving brochures at perspiring cheeks, shouting at errant children. The elderly tourists move in packs, clutching walkers or fooling with wheelchairs, while the young stop periodically to bitch about the hard sidewalks and whisper, surprised, about how many black people there are in Paris.
Most of them, just before leaving home, watched Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron dance through white-bread streets and are shocked by today’s rues and avenues. Instead of fat old men with mustaches offering slices of cheese with aperitifs, they’re faced with white boys in dirty dreadlocks playing movie sound tracks on beat-up guitars, suspiciously pushy Africans selling miniature Eiffel Towers and models of the Louvre pyramid, and hordes of tourists like themselves, guided by stern elderly French women waving colored flags to keep them on track.
Of course, there was plenty of beauty in Paris, but, given his reason for being there, Milo could hardly see it.
He found a bench at the Place de la Concorde end of the park, facing tree-lined Avenue Gabriel and the embassy at number 2. He gave a smile to the old woman beside him on the bench, surrounded by pigeons. She returned his smile and tossed crumbs at the birds. It was only twelve ten, so he searched his pockets for cigarettes before guilt overwhelmed him and he let them be. He crossed his arms over his chest and stared at the white wedding-cake building with three uniformed marines in its yard wearing automatic rifles.
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Olen Steinhauer
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Шпионские детективы
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: Superb new CIA thriller featuring black ops expert Milo Weaver and acclaimed by Lee Child as ‘first class – the kind of thing John le Carre might have written’In the global age of the CIA, wherever there′s trouble, there′s a Tourist: the men and women who do the dirty work. They′re the Company′s best agents – and Milo Weaver was the best of them all.Following a near-lethal encounter with foreign hitman the ′Tiger′, a burnt-out Milo decides to continue his work from behind a desk. Four years later, he′s no closer to finding the Tiger than he was before. When the elusive assassin unexpectedly gives himself up to Milo, it′s because he wants something in return: revenge.Once a Tourist, always a Tourist – soon Milo is back in the field, tracking down the Tiger′s handler in a world of betrayal, skewed politics and extreme violence. It′s a world he knows well but he′s about to learn the toughest lesson of all: trust no one.