3
Her room was larger than his, with a sofa and a couple of chairs at one end, where she’d placed a shoebox-sized package of airline Scotch bottles. “You were expecting me.”
“If I’d known it would be you, I would’ve gotten vodka.” She leaned close and kissed him on the cheek, then settled herself on the sofa, legs crossed at the ankles, robe opening naturally to her thigh. He’d forgotten how she did this, putting men in their place so quickly. Or, rather, he hadn’t forgotten it; he had just forgotten how effective it was. He settled on a chair, opened two of the bottles, and passed one to her.
“I haven’t had a drink in three weeks,” she said.
“To abstinence.”
“Chin chin,” she said, raising her bottle, then downing it.
For propriety’s sake, he did the same thing, and his throat burned.
“Looks like your shoulder healed nicely,” he said.
She grinned and pinwheeled her arm to prove his point. The last time they’d seen each other, in 2008, Leticia had been shot in the shoulder by Chinese State Security. “Malaysian doctors,” Leticia said, “are miracle workers.”
“Is that why you disappeared? Alex and I searched the whole hotel.”
“I left because I knew you weren’t done,” she said. “If I’d stayed around I would’ve ended up helping you, bad shoulder or not. And I needed a break.”
“I wouldn’t have pushed you.”
“You never do,” she said with a crooked smile. “You just show off those sad brown eyes.”
He smiled despite himself.
“Besides, I didn’t fancy working for you.”
Though Milo held on to his smile, he felt a tinge of disappointment. “I don’t think you know what working for me entails.”
“No?” She shrugged. “Ten years ago I see you working with Alexandra Primakov, your sister, who’s got some weird, undefined position in UNESCO. Soon afterward, I find out that you’re also working for UNESCO—as was your father, old Yevgeny, before he was killed. I’ve got all that right?”
Milo echoed her shrug and waited.
“So I start checking other names. Lo and behold, Alan Drummond, former Tourism director, he’s also got a position with UNESCO. I mean, when did that rowdy crew get interested in education, science, and culture? It’s a curiosity, and you know I’m nothing if not curious.”
“It’s a well-known fact.”
“So I reestablished some old contacts, one of whom had also started working for the UN. For the Library.”
“Hmm,” he said thoughtfully, though what he really wanted to say was Who the hell spoke to you?
“Does it make you happy?” she asked.
He was taken aback by the question; it wasn’t the kind of thing people in their business asked. “I don’t know,” he said. “Does anything?”
She leaned forward, not bothering to clutch her robe shut as she grabbed two more bottles and tossed him one; he caught it.
“What about you?” he asked. “Are you happy now that you’ve thrown off your employers? Now that you’re free?”
She smiled at him, blinked slowly, then took a sip of Scotch. Quietly, she said, “April, four years ago. I was in Lagos. Working for those assholes in the Netherlands.”
“Maastricht Securities. I met your old boss.”
“Doing your homework,” she said. “One tight ass, that one.”
“Agreed.”
“It was pretty straightforward. We had some investors—American, French, Russian, and British—who wanted to scoop up one of the large coltan mines the Nigerian government was selling off.”
“Coltan?” Milo asked.
“Columbite-tantalites. Used to extract niobium and tantalum. Tantalum helps make your computers and phones work.”
“Okay, I get it.”
“Well, the state had never run any of its mines well, and the deaths of a couple miners a few months before made it a hot potato they just wanted to get rid of.”
“Why were you there?”
“To fix a problem. There was a local consortium of business leaders that wanted to buy it for themselves. Keep the money in Nigeria. The newspapers were picking up on the story. Not good.”
“You do some nastiness?”
Leticia gave him a hard look. “I got the job done, okay? And no one got hurt.”
“Glad to hear it.”
“Are you going to keep acting like that?”
“No, no. Go on.” Milo leaned back, took a sip, and resolved to shut up. But it was hard, because it truly was good to see her again, and part of the pleasure was the sparring.
She said, “We were closing the deal when Boko Haram kidnapped those girls in Chibok. I asked Maastricht for leave to look into it. They wanted me back home, but I could have a week on my own dime. Fine. Whatever. I hauled myself across the country to Borno State and took a look for myself.” She hesitated, looking deeply into his eyes. “I’ve seen a lot, Milo, but I’ve never seen anything like that. Two hundred and seventy-six girls. Gone. It breaks a village right in half.”
Milo wanted to speak, even felt she would have welcomed a word from him, but found that he had nothing to say.
Eventually she continued. “I met with local law enforcement, and I’m not going to call them saints by any means, but this hurt them as much as anyone else. They knew, right then at the beginning, that nothing was going to happen. They knew that in the capital, in Abuja, they didn’t even exist. Why? Because they didn’t have coltan deposits. They didn’t have diamonds or gold or iron ore. All they had was a little glass sand, bentonite, some diatomite. Nothing worth protecting. Which left them at the mercy of Boko Haram, or anyone who wanted to remake them in their own image.”
“But they drew attention to their story,” Milo pointed out. “It was an international scandal.”
“And they still don’t have all their kids, do they? And a year later the government tried to deny them voter ID cards, so they couldn’t even use the only power they really had.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Why would you? Why would anyone? When I got back to Maastricht, I put it to them that we had the network and the resources to go in and find these girls. No, there wouldn’t be a big payday, but I asked that asshole to imagine the goodwill Maastricht Securities would receive if we brought those kids home. Know what he said?”
“I could guess.”
“He said that we’re not in the business of goodwill. He told me to join UNESCO.” She shook her head, grinning. “If only he knew, right?”
“But you didn’t quit until last year.”
“I found Maastricht’s network useful for my purposes.”
“What purposes?”
“Trying to do something about it. Amsterdam didn’t need to know. By the time I did quit, I’d exhausted their usefulness.”
“And?”
“And what?” she said.
“Last year, July 2017. A hundred and twenty more girls were kidnapped by Boko Haram. Did you approach Amsterdam again?”
“I did. He still said no.”
“And what did you tell him?”
“I told him to lick my clit.”
He knew better than to ask if she’d really said that, so he just reached down for another tiny bottle and handed it over to her, then took another for himself. Together, they unscrewed their caps and drank.
“So,” Milo said. “That’s what moves you now? Injustice?”
“Don’t say it like that.”
“Like what?”
She didn’t answer but said, “What moves you, Milo?”
“The usual.”
“Not the usual,” Leticia said, shaking her head. “Back when I knew you, there were only two things that moved you. Tina and Stephanie.”
“They still do.”
“And that’s it? You look around this shitty world, the one you’re leaving for your daughter, and you don’t find anything that you feel you must fix before handing i
t over to her? Is there nothing you see that must be repaired?”
He licked the bitter whisky off his teeth. “Yeah, actually. There is something,” he said, then told her about the thing that kept him up nights. The shift, in country after country, to authoritarian leadership and the growing distrust of objective facts. As he rattled off his grievances, she settled back and laid her arms along the back of the sofa, her features relaxing into an expression one rarely saw in Leticia’s always alert face. If he didn’t know better, he would have thought she had fallen asleep with her eyes open. But he did know better. He knew that she was listening very carefully.
When he finished, she said, “Fascism, huh?”
Milo opened his hands. “Populism. Authoritarianism. Maybe it’s just law and or—”
“It’s not law and order,” she cut in. “Call it what it is. It’s us against them. It’s fear of the Other. It’s racism.”
He nodded. “Racism, then.”
“Don’t say it like that.”
“I’m agreeing.”
She frowned at him, distrustful, and said, “Okay, then. Tell me what, exactly, the Library does about this wickedness? Go on, Milo. Sell it to me.”
He knew by the way she asked it that the question was a setup. But he’d flown to Japan for this meeting, and all he could do was play his part. “We observe,” Milo told her. “We report. That’s why it’s called the Library. Spread the facts, unvarnished by politics or spin, and let the governments take care of the problem. That’s their job.”
Leticia shook her head, looking mildly disgusted. Straightening, she said, “You know who would do something?”
“Tell me.”
“Back in January, I got another visitor. Like you.”
“Just like me?”
“Ain’t no one just like you.” She winked, but there was something cold in that move that made him anxious. “Calls herself Joan. Recruiter from DC. She tells me I’m wasted where I am. Tells me it’s time to come back into the fold.”
“Into the fold?” Milo blinked, his head buzzing. He understood what she was saying, even though he could hardly believe it. “You mean—”
“I told her,” she cut in, “that I could never work for the Department of Tourism again. I told her that I was there when the Chinese killed thirty-three of us. Then I asked what she knew about that. Joan was a soft-looking woman, but she didn’t blink. For all I know she had no idea what I was talking about.”
“Then how do you know she was Tourism?”
Leticia rocked her head. “She used my old code. The commander of the Sixth Division reported … that Novograd-Volynsk was taken at dawn today. If Joan isn’t Tourism, then she’s got all the files.”
The surprise was heavy, pressing him down. He’d heard rumors over the years that CIA had resurrected the department, but it was in the nature of Tourism that every kind of rumor was to be expected. Rumors became legend, and legends provoked fear in America’s enemies. You could win a whole fight by scaring your enemies into submission, all for the cost of a little gossip, and this was what Milo had convinced himself was going on. Maybe he’d only convinced himself of what he’d wanted to believe.
Milo finished his Scotch, scratched at his nose, and placed the bottle on the table. “You know what was wrong with Tourism? Other than its security vulnerabilities.”
“Tell me, Milo.”
“It became an instrument of political violence. Not governmental. Political. Any politician who got their hands on it started playing their own game.”
“And the Library is different. Tell me who pays your bills.”
“Independence is a long-term goal.”
“That sounds a long way away.”
He didn’t bother to reply.
“And that’s why you don’t have to even ask me the question.”
“What question?”
“Whether or not I’ll become one of your librarians. You’re living in a dream world, Milo. To change the world your way, the people you give information to have to be honorable. They have to want to do good. Do you really think that a report on a fascist tide rising across the globe is going to get liberal democracies to push it back?” She shook her head. “No, baby. Politicians and businesses in those democracies are just going to calculate how to cash in on the new world.”
4
Milo woke late, the suddenly bright Wakkanai light cutting into his cursed hangover, and when he looked out his window and squinted he finally saw it in the distance: the Russian island of Sakhalin. Two islands … no, just one, but he was seeing double. He’d drunk with Leticia until three, at which point she had suggested that if he stayed any longer they were going to have to have sex, so he staggered to the door and accepted the kiss she planted on his lips, as well as the advice she left him with as her large, beautiful eyes peered deep into him: “You have to make a choice, Milo. Either you’re on this earth to do good, or you’re wasting space.”
He nearly missed his flight back to Haneda Airport, and once he reached it he planted himself behind a counter and ate fried crustaceans until his nerves settled down. For the rest of the six-hour layover, he alternated between reading field reports forwarded to him by the reference librarians, and thinking about his failed recruitment of Leticia Jones. It was a blow, though not entirely unexpected, for she had always followed her own path. And now she’d discovered a conscience. A need to do rather than just witness. Were a few hundred kidnapped girls what it took to soften one of the hardest hearts he’d ever known? Perhaps. Or maybe she was playing a game of her own with him, which he wouldn’t understand until weeks or months had passed. That, too, was possible.
Long game or not, her questions still weighed on him. Was he merely an observer? Of course he was, because that’s the business he was in. No one faulted journalists for remaining separate from their subjects’ lives, and in fact when they did become involved it meant they had broken one of journalism’s ethical tenets. This dispassionate approach to the Library’s intelligence work had always been attractive, because even when the world was falling apart he could remain at arm’s length, describing it for his patrons. The world was never his responsibility, nor his fault.
Certainly there had been times—in Germany, in China—when he’d tossed out that ethical rule book, when his sense of right and wrong had gotten the better of him. But could he really say the world was a better place because of his escapades? How had saving Martin Bishop gone?
He didn’t have to look far to find a world in disarray, slouching toward oblivion. Two hundred seventy-six, then a hundred and twenty, girls in Nigeria. Millions of refugees streaming out of Syria. Venezuela ripping itself apart. Pirates on the high seas. Typhoons burying Filipinos in mud, hurricanes and heat waves and melting poles. Electorates in Russia, Poland, Brazil, Egypt, Turkey, and the UK voting for their own dark futures—not to mention the political turmoil in America.
He couldn’t save them all, but could he save some?
What if? What if he did choose to do more than just report on travesties to the Library’s more upstanding patrons? To step into the currents of history and redirect a few streams?
He knew what would follow: The nations that funded the Library would react immediately, rightly fearing that one day Milo would come knocking on their own doors. No one wants to pay for a policeman they can’t control. The cash would dry up, and the sixty-eight librarians spread across the globe, both full- and part-time, would be unemployed. Or worse.
He upgraded to a particularly pleasant business class for the Emirates flight that took nearly eleven hours to reach Dubai, and on the plane he wrote two reports on the concerns he’d listened to in Manila. After he landed he sent one report to Paris for UNESCO to keep in its files, and the second, more detailed one went to Zürich, where the reference librarians could add it to their enormous database that, stuffed with fifteen years of secret knowledge, was probably the Library’s greatest asset. He made a few calls before boarding the next fligh
t to Algiers, and once on the ground at Houari Boumediene, he asked Zürich to tell Kirill Egorov that he would be at the Library’s local safe house until early evening, when he would have to fly on to New York to find out what the patrons wanted from him.
The half-hour taxi ride took him along the Bay of Algiers, where the blinding afternoon sunlight bleached shipping freighters and fishing boats. To the north, Palma and Ibiza were so close and yet a world away from North Africa. Eventually his taxi turned inland to reach the Hotel La Famille in Bab El Oued. Milo paid the driver and took his bag inside, standing in the cool lobby until the taxi had left again. He smiled at the proprietor, an old man with a large set of keys hanging from his belt, then walked out of the hotel without saying a word.
It didn’t take long, walking west along Avenue Colonel Lofti, to find Rue Rosseti, where he knocked on the inconspicuous door. The old, round woman who answered wore a black jilbab, only her face and hands visible. “Où sont les autres dilettantes?” she asked, almost spitting the nonsense passphrase.
“Ils sont derrière la grange,” he told her, and as she took a step backward into the gloom she grunted in irritation.
She led him up the dark stairwell to the second floor and worked at a heavy door with bars over the window until it popped open to reveal a small, humid studio apartment, blinds down, a table with a couple of wooden chairs, and a sad-looking sofa against a water-stained wall. From the looks of the place, this janitor wasn’t earning her stipend. There was mold along one edge of the carpet and ancient cracks in the walls that made him worry the building’s foundation might be damaged. The counters in the kitchenette were filthy.
After the French passphrase, she didn’t say another word to him, communicating with her hands and eyes. It was possible that she didn’t know any French beyond the code. She showed him that the refrigerator, which was dead, contained six large bottles of water. She demonstrated how the door would lock on its own when he left, then made a big deal about pocketing the keys so he knew he wouldn’t be trusted with them.
Then she was gone, and Milo went to turn on the overhead light, but the switch did nothing. He tried the kitchen, and then the floor lamp by the sofa. She hadn’t even paid the electric bill. He sighed and went to peek out the blinds down to Rue Rosseti, and saw their useless janitor hurrying down the street and back to her life.
The Last Tourist Page 6