The Last Tourist

by Olen Steinhauer

  I sighed involuntarily. It was the best news I’d heard in a while.

  “And if everything works out,” he added, “I’ll finally get back to mine.”

  PART TWO

  THE ELEPHANT

  MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, TO THURSDAY, OCTOBER 4, 2018

  FOUR MONTHS AGO

  1

  Milo Weaver rode the Narita Airport escalator up from arrivals to where the enormous departures board floated above travelers’ heads, displaying seemingly random cities, first in Japanese, then English, and back again. His personal phone was pressed against his ear, and he said, “It’s a different world now.”

  He was replying to his wife, Tina, who was lamenting their daughter’s recent dramas in high school, where she had been targeted by a girl whose family had recently arrived in Zürich from Lebanon. “She shouldn’t have to deal with bullies,” Tina had said. “I never had to.”

  Which was when Milo reminded her that this world was different than theirs had been.

  He might have gone further, telling her that his own schizophrenic high school experience had been riddled with bullies, the kind who would make today’s bullies look like mice, and it had taught him the value of confrontation, but he didn’t want to dig a hole for himself when he was going to have to hang up any second. He hadn’t seen his family in a week, leaving the day after Stephanie’s seventeenth birthday party, and once he was done with Tokyo he would be able to once again settle into the comforting obligations of domesticity.

  “What does the teacher say?” he asked.

  “They don’t believe in obstructing the natural developmental curve.”

  “What?”

  “Exactly.”

  “You’re the one who wanted a progressive school.”

  “You sound like your sister. Progressive isn’t synonymous with mean.”

  Milo searched the faces in the crowd as he made his way to the exit. “Why don’t we talk to the kid’s parents? Even if I’m delayed I’ll be back by the end of the week, so let’s set up something for Friday.”

  “I don’t want to talk to them.”

  “Then what do you want to do?”

  There was silence on the line as he exited to the curb, rolling his carry-on, and the noise of arriving taxis swelled around him. Across the busy access road, he found the face he’d been looking for: a man in his early forties, Kaito Fukaya, whose work name was Poitevin. Poitevin noticed him as well, then turned to look in the other direction, to where a Boeing Dreamliner rose whining into the sky.

  “Okay,” Tina said as he crossed the road. “We’ll talk to them. You better be back by then.”

  “I promise.”

  By the time he hung up he was close enough to Poitevin to reach out and touch his shoulder but didn’t. Instead, as they both walked the long arc that connected the three terminals of Narita International, he let Poitevin remain a step or two ahead of him, and as they conversed they never looked at each other. To an outside observer, they were strangers heading in the same direction.

  “Your plane was late,” Poitevin said in his heavy accent.

  “We had to refuel in Mozambique,” Milo answered, which was just the passphrase. In reality, he’d flown direct from Manila, where he’d gone to confer with the UNESCO field office about an arrest warrant hard-line president Rodrigo Duterte had issued for Senator Antonio Trillanes IV, a prominent critic. It had led to a standoff, with Trillanes holing himself up in the Senate building, the one place in the country he was immune from arrest. The newspapers were going crazy, and the UNESCO officers, who thought of Milo as some vanilla representative of the central office in Paris, told him they feared unrest and a crackdown by Duterte. Milo should have been in and out in a day, but the airport closed as category 5 typhoon Mangkhut made landfall, and he camped out with a UN lifer at his apartment in the upscale Pasay district, drinking imported whisky and listening to his host’s complaints about a country he loved turning sour. More interesting was the man’s girlfriend, a corporate lawyer negotiating the sale of Asia-Wide, a local shipping company that had recently filed for bankruptcy.

  “The pirates did it,” she’d told Milo. “Last month was the third attack. A dozen sailors and fifty million worth of cargo sunk to the bottom of the Pacific, between here and Guam.” That had been the final nail in the coffin of what had been one of the largest shippers in the Philippine Sea. Given the dangers, only one brave company had stepped forward: Salid Logistics, a conglomerate out of Oman. With a resigned shrug, she’d summed it up in a single word, “Globalism,” and reached for her glass.

  By the time Milo was able to fly out, fifty-four Filipinos had been confirmed killed by mudslides, another forty-nine missing. Then he’d gotten Poitevin’s flash alert, forcing him to change flights and come to Japan.

  “She’s in Tokyo?” Milo asked him.

  Poitevin shook his head. “Not anymore. Yesterday she flew up to Hokkaido. Staying in Wakkanai.”

  This was a surprise. Why had the woman he was looking for moved to the northernmost tip of Japan, twenty miles off the coast of the Russian island of Sakhalin? “What’s she doing there?”

  “I think she’s hiding.”

  “From whom?”

  A shrug. “You’ll have to ask her. I put her address on the server.”

  “Anyone else watching her?”

  “I didn’t see anyone.”

  The flight to Wakkanai left from Haneda Airport, so Milo had to take an hour-long taxi ride across the southeastern end of the city, skirting the edge of Tokyo Bay. He filled his time on the phone, talking to his reference librarians in Zürich. One of them, Noah, reported that Stabyhoun, a librarian in Greece, had uncovered Turkish agents giving financial support to antigovernment protesters. Milo, intrigued, suggested Stabyhoun follow up on his observations with a preliminary report they could share with the patrons.

  Kristin, the other reference librarian, told him about a report from Whippet, in Paris, that the French had been monitoring Chinese efforts to mass-produce 3D-printed plastic pistols that could defeat detectors and cross borders. “How far along are they?” he asked.

  “Same logjam as everyone else. They shoot one bullet beautifully, but the barrel explodes.”

  “Not very useful.”

  “Depends on how many bullets you need,” she said, then told him about a message that had come in: Kirill Egorov, the Russian consul in Algeria, wanted to speak with him.

  “What’s it about?”

  “He wouldn’t say. Just called the old central number and demanded the message get to you. I sent you his callback number.”

  Though he knew of Egorov, and had even met him once, the old Russian’s connection to the Library was to its previous chief, Milo’s father. Once upon a time, Yevgeny Primakov and Kirill Egorov had been colleagues in Russian intelligence, and when Yevgeny took an abrupt turn and landed at the United Nations, most of his old friends had scorned him. Even Egorov had turned his back, but a few years later their paths had crossed over Iraq, and they began to talk again, trading secrets like baseball cards. But since Milo had taken over ten years ago, Egorov, then a consul to Germany, had gone quiet, and Milo had only kept track of his late career from a distance, a series of foreign postings in steadily less important lands, now Algeria.

  “I’ll call him,” Milo told her. “How’s my sister doing?”

  “Hold on,” Kristin said. “She needs to talk to you about something.”

  Once he realized he’d be delayed returning home, he’d asked his sister, Alexandra, to watch over the Zürich office. Reluctantly she’d agreed, and when she came on the line he immediately said, “I’ll be back soon, Alex.”

  “No you won’t,” she said gloomily.

  “Why not?”

  “The patrons are demanding a meeting at Turtle Bay. Soon as possible.”

  “Shit,” Milo said, wondering if he’d been too optimistic promising to be home by Friday.

  He waited until he was through secur
ity at Haneda before checking his messages, which required face recognition and two lengthy passwords to reach the server, which was encrypted to a degree that only the hackers in the Library’s employ knew how to describe. All this just to retrieve two small items: an address in Wakkanai, and a phone number with an Algerian country code. He called the number, and Kirill Egorov picked up on the second ring with a wary “Allô?”

  “Privet,” Milo said, and continued in Russian, “I heard you were looking for me.”

  “Thank Christ,” the old Russian said, sounding relieved. He didn’t say Milo’s name on what was presumably an open line. “I didn’t think the number would even be in service anymore.”

  “It won’t be for much longer. What can I do for you?”

  “I have someone who needs your protection.”

  “We don’t protect people. That’s not what we do.”

  “Tell me about Martin Bishop, then,” Egorov said, sounding smug.

  Milo closed his eyes, irritated. “That was different.”

  “It wasn’t. You helped an innocent whose life was in danger through no fault of his own. You made an effort to ensure that he would remain safe. This is precisely the same situation.”

  Egorov had been his father’s friend, but Milo didn’t know what kind of man Egorov had become since then. How, for example, had he survived this last decade in Putin’s Russia? What compromises had he made? Men of his father’s generation had spent their entire lives compromising, and by a certain point it became second nature, so that eventually you lost track of whatever principles you once had. “Who,” Milo asked, “is this innocent?”

  “Did you hear of Anna Urusov?”

  “The dissident blogger in Moscow? She died last month.”

  “It’s connected. This person is connected. He fled Moscow and landed in Germany. I found him in Paris.”

  Milo sighed. “Are you the one protecting him now?”

  “I have been, but I can’t anymore.”

  “Where is he?”

  “I cannot tell you.”

  “Then why don’t you get your people to protect him?”

  Now Egorov sighed. “Your father never would have had to ask that question.”

  It wasn’t the first time someone had thrown his esteemed father in his face, and it wouldn’t be the last. “And now he’s dead. If you want to talk in more detail, we can send someone to debrief—”

  “No,” Egorov cut in. “I cannot trust this with anyone else. You’ll understand when we speak.”

  Milo didn’t want to give in, but … “Look, I should be able to lay over in Algiers by Wednesday. We have a secure location there.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Don’t thank me—I don’t know if I can help.”

  “But you will.” The old man was nothing if not persistent.

  “I’ll tell the office to get in touch once we know my timing.”

  “Thank you,” Egorov said again, and before Milo could temper his expectations the Russian hung up.

  2

  Wakkanai Airport was a small affair after Haneda, but it was efficiently laid out, and soon he was taking a taxi past a big open field into town. He didn’t know what to make of Egorov’s call, and he regretted how quickly he’d promised to go to Algiers. The week was becoming packed, particularly with the patrons demanding a New York meeting. Ever since taking over the Library he’d found himself making concessions—not just to the patrons, who had worked from that first day to siphon his power, but to his father’s old friends. Yevgeny Primakov had been profusely social, getting what he needed by way of charm and cleverness. He’d been the kind of man who changed the flavor of a room just by entering it, and as it turned out such traits were not hereditary.

  Poitevin’s address led him to the Wakkanai Sun Hotel, a few blocks from Soya Bay. The hotel was wildly misnamed, at least on this cold afternoon with its slate-gray sky and ominous black clouds pushing in from the east.

  Whether or not he found her, he needed a place to sleep before boarding his next flight. There had been a time, long ago, when constant movement had been his friend—but he’d been a different person then, a Tourist, popping amphetamines before skulking down alleys, living on the periphery of real human existence. Anything had been possible before life finally came knocking. Age had undermined him. Parenthood, too.

  Through the windows of his fifth-floor room, he tried and failed to find Sakhalin Island through the gloom, then shut his blinds and thought back to his reason for being here: He had come to make the offer of a job.

  The last he’d heard was that she was making her way consulting for Amsterdam-based Maastricht Securities, but then a year ago, after a stint in Nigeria, she had abruptly quit. He’d had a conversation with her chief in their office on the banks of the Maas River, a pale thirtysomething with too-efficient manners who considered her departure a stroke of good fortune. “We are here,” he told Milo, “for the good of our clients. This is a dispassionate business—it has to be.”

  “You’re saying she was emotionally involved?”

  “I’m saying she was all emotion.”

  The description had troubled him, because even though he hadn’t seen her for ten years his memories were of a fiercely committed professional who, despite a flair for the dramatic, was never undermined by undue emotion. But looking at her old chief, who patted his mustache dry after each sip of Aquaviva, he suddenly trusted his own memories a little more.

  It had taken a while to track her down. There had been a security detail for visiting businessmen in Malaysia, an unexplained appearance in Cape Town, and then, two days ago, word from Poitevin that she’d been sighted in a Tokyo nightclub with two members of Naikaku Jōhō Chōsashitsu, the Cabinet Intelligence and Research Office, Japan’s largely disrespected foreign intelligence agency. Poitevin, who had his own contacts in Cabinet Intelligence, learned only that she had come to sell some information and move on.

  But she hadn’t moved on. Instead, she’d flown to the northernmost point in Japan and checked into the Wakkanai Sun Hotel, where from the windows, on clear days, you could see Russia.

  Milo showered and changed into some crumpled clothes, then went downstairs. The restaurant was mostly empty, the only other diners elderly Japanese who were too polite to stare at the Westerner struggling to debone his grilled rockfish.

  Noah had looked into the hotel’s computer system and come up with two rooms attached to Western names and passports. In 215, Mr. and Mrs. Gary Young, British, and in 306 Ms. Deborah Steele, American. It didn’t take a genius to figure out which she was, but he didn’t want to rush it. If he trusted his memories, then he knew that a forward attack wasn’t going to end well for him. Ideally, he would make himself known by doing this—sitting in the open clumsily eating fish—and she would come to him.

  So he read brochures in the lobby and took a walk down to the bleak-looking harbor and peered at a large yacht with Chinese markings as the sun fell, then returned to the hotel. On the way, he noted a yellow M3 spray-painted on a wall, and wondered how the Massive Brigade was inspiring Japan’s youth.

  Back in his room, he sat on the bed and checked messages, sent requests and, remembering Egorov, searched for the website that, until her reported suicide last month—by placing her head in her gas oven and asphyxiating herself—had been maintained by investigative journalist Anna Usurov. Russian journalists died faster than coal miners, and younger: Usurov had only been twenty-eight. Her blog, RESIST, was no longer up, and a government notice informed him that his IP address had now been logged.

  He called home at eleven-thirty. Stephanie had just returned from school, where there had been another run-in with her bully, Halifa Abi, which had resulted in a trip to the director’s office for them both. Halifa had loudly critiqued her singing ability after the audition for a school show, and when Stephanie tried to ignore her, the girl called her a cunt. In reply, Stephanie had called her an anti-Semite.

  “What?”

/>   “But she is.”

  “She might be, Little Miss,” he told her, “but it’s a rough thing to call someone.”

  “And cunt isn’t?”

  “You’re right, you’re right,” he muttered, wishing for the old days when her school fights were simple bursts of jealousy that could be unraveled with an evening chat and a glass of warm milk.

  Tina came on and told him that she had confirmed a Friday meeting at four thirty with Halifa’s parents, and that he’d better make it. “Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” he said.

  After he hung up, he thought about his daughter’s troubles and wondered how, exactly, the fight had gone down. Was it possible that this Lebanese immigrant was so bold as to attack Stephanie outright, unprovoked? After all, Halifa was a newcomer to the school, and it seemed unlikely that she’d go out of her way to make enemies so quickly. Had Stephanie said something, even something innocent, that hadn’t made the story’s final cut?

  But this was his problem, wasn’t it? After so long, living in a world where the obvious story was seldom the truth, he couldn’t help but question his daughter’s version of events. What he knew was that, come Friday, he could let none of his doubt show. Loyalty would have to come before objectivity.

  And, he thought as he got up and put on his shoes again, he couldn’t sit around waiting for people to come to him. At this rate, he would never make it home. So he trotted down to the third floor and approached 306. Knocked and waited. Nothing. He knocked again and said, “Leticia, it’s Milo. Let’s have a conversation, shall we?”

  When she opened the door, she was wearing a plush red robe that he didn’t remember seeing in his own closet, which meant that she’d taken the effort to bring her own. Which was very Leticia Jones. But even though she looked as if she’d settled in for the night, she’d recently reapplied her blood-red lipstick, and now she smiled at him. “Milo, did you really think I’d come to you? Please.”