Alan eyeballed him as they came to a stop behind a large truck. “Wait, you don’t mean—”
“Tourism.”
Alan exhaled. “I’ll be damned.”
“We’ll all be damned.”
“But it’s not surprising. You’re not surprised, are you?”
“A little.”
As the traffic finally opened up, neither said a thing, the pile-on of memories burying their words. Eventually, Milo said, “Can you talk to your old contacts about it? We can’t afford not to know what they’re doing.”
“Sure. But maybe we’re too worried. The department lasted for decades. It did good work. And look around—you think Tourists wouldn’t be useful right now? Jesus, just think about what they could do in Ukraine or North Korea. Gather ten of them, and the Russians would never touch our elections again. They’re effective.”
It had always been the most persuasive argument for Tourism—its effectiveness when diplomacy was shot. But Milo knew too well the other side of the argument. “They’re too powerful to be a permanent fixture.”
Alan shrugged, then nodded ahead at an enormous billboard advertising a TV show—a spy drama set in Berlin, attractive actors in dark outfits, looking intently at the camera. Someone had used a ladder and red spray paint so that the image was covered in two enormous characters: M3.
“And are they too powerful?” Alan asked.
10
It was after one when Alan let him out in front of the slab of the United Nations Headquarters, which many of its employees called Turtle Bay after the neighborhood. Milo only made it a few steps before he heard Alan shouting at him. He turned to see his deputy holding out the plastic cup of green liquefied health. “You forgot the smoothie!” he shouted.
“Keep it,” Milo called, then hurried across UN Plaza and up the stairs to the entrance. Security took a moment to examine his scuffed, laminated ID before waving him on. In the elevator, he got a few looks from the other employees rising with him, and that was when he realized he should have changed, because the dust of Algiers was still all over him. Again, he wasn’t the man he used to be.
He got out on a high floor and wandered down the narrow corridor until he’d reached a door with a plaque: DEPUTY AMBASSADOR TO THE UNITED NATIONS, ALGERIA, SAID BENSOUSSAN. He knocked once, waited, then knocked again. Finally a slim secretary with hair up in a bun opened the door. A flash of familiarity, but only slight, for he rarely visited the patrons’ offices. He put on a smile. “Milo Weaver. I’d like to speak with the deputy ambassador, please.”
She stepped back and gestured to the chairs across from her desk. “I will see if Mr. Bensoussan is available.” She disappeared behind another door, gave him a moment to collect himself, then stepped out again and opened her hand for Milo to enter.
Said Bensoussan was just shy of forty, as slim as his secretary, and more stylish than his job required. Immaculate suits, a perfectly coiffed goatee, and manicured nails gave him a fussy look that always impressed Milo, for whom vanity felt like one thing too many to keep track of. Bensoussan was also much smarter than the ambassador he served.
“Sit down, sit down,” he said, rising to shake Milo’s hand. Once his secretary had closed the door, Bensoussan went through the pleasantries. “When did you get in? Have you rested? What can I get you?”
“Listen,” Milo said, “I wanted to thank you. I’m told you made a call on my behalf.”
“My pleasure. However, no one I talked to admitted knowing anything about you. I’m not sure I was any help.”
“For the effort, then.”
Bensoussan opened his hands and settled back behind his desk. “Perhaps you’d like to tell me about it.”
Milo told the Egorov story just as it had happened, fighting his natural instinct to hide details from a patron. He knew that Bensoussan in particular was adept at catching loose details and holding on to them, patiently waiting for other puzzle pieces to fit, until he could eventually create entire pictures of things you never wanted to share. But in this case, Milo hoped that openness would encourage Bensoussan to react in kind.
By the time he finished, Bensoussan had taken a cigar from a box and begun rolling it in his fingers, a cue that he was deep in thought. “You don’t believe the official story? Heart attack?”
“Do you?”
Bensoussan shrugged. “Whether or not Egorov was murdered, it doesn’t answer the question of who he wanted to hand over to you. You said he had changed his movements?”
“Last month, after a trip to Paris.”
“And the DSS found nothing at the café. Did they speak to his mistress?”
“I don’t know. Can you ask?”
“Who questioned you?”
“His name’s Mustafa Rahmani.”
Said nodded severely. “I’ll let you know whatever he decides to tell me.”
“Are you worried they won’t tell you?”
“These days, one never knows,” he said, opening his hands. “I haven’t seen my president for months. In this world, everything is a question mark.”
“Wasn’t it always?”
Said smiled and rocked his head. “We’ll see you in a few hours, correct?”
“Both me and Alan.”
“Good.”
“What’s it about?”
A smile twisted the corner of his lips but didn’t spread any farther. “A month ago you sent in the preliminary fiscal year 2019 budget.”
“Ah,” Milo said, instantly annoyed.
Bensoussan picked up on this. “We pay a lot of money for the Library’s services, Milo. You have to expect your customers to ask for improvements now and then.”
“What kind of improvements?”
Bensoussan blinked at him, then shook his head. “Nothing too egregious, I’m sure. We’ll talk this evening.”
After the Algiers safe house, the Hilton room that had been reserved for him to freshen up in felt like decadence. He took a long shower, pulled on a thick robe, and drank coffee while looking out at the UN building from his thirty-ninth-floor window. Beyond lay the East River and Long Island. It was a clear day, the sun sinking behind his building, and as he stared he listened to American news playing on television.
Anthony Halliwell, head of Northwell International, was in Congress defending against news reports of the massacre of Afghan citizens by his private soldiers. This was what Rahmani had been talking about: America farming out the defense of its empire to contractors who lacked discipline. Stories like the Northwell massacre were the bread and butter of North African politics, used as a cudgel during campaign speeches to the wound-up masses.
There was a lot of talk about Donald Trump, Special Counsel Robert Mueller, and the upcoming midterm elections. Trump was on-screen, shouting about a caravan of Central Americans marching north in order to justify his promised border wall. His words sounded familiar, the same sort of rhetoric he’d heard in Hungary, Poland, France, and Britain about Syrian refugees escaping war. And if Alan’s scientists were right—and after three years of research by hundreds of scientists checking one another’s work, he didn’t doubt they were—then refugees would be the new reality, fleeing natural disasters, wars over water rights, disease, and starvation.
Just thinking about it gave him a headache.
A well-known, mustached commentator named Sam Schumer came on the screen to discuss the Massive Brigade’s three-month burst of violence earlier in the year, the explosions in shopping malls, a kidnapped CEO, the brief hacking of the DC electrical grid, and the numerous bank robberies. Then President Trump was there again, in the Rose Garden, declaring that the Massive Brigade, like ISIS, had been defeated. “I don’t think any previous administration could have taken care of it so quickly,” he said.
There followed a blurry photo of a middle-aged woman with dark hair, a baby in her arms, sitting in a dilapidated living room with young people who all looked to her with something approaching adoration. It was an odd photo, with the fe
el of a Virgin Mary re-creation.
Schumer said, “Their new leader, Ingrid Parker, seen here living underground with her Massive Brigade comrades, is still on the loose. The silence these last months is not defeat. We know this—even the president knows this. It’s only the calm before the storm. Stay vigilant.”
He met Alan at Sakagura, a moody Japanese restaurant hidden beneath an office building on East Forty-Third. Around them, in other dim booths, customers talked animatedly but quietly, as if the very design of the place had lowered their volume. Architecture as mood control. He and Alan followed suit, talking quietly about regular business and making plans to distribute recent intelligence that had come in from Brazil concerning the popular right-wing presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro. After Milo talked him through the report he’d sent in on the Philippines, Alan started complaining about DC. “It’s a cesspool of Chinese, Saudi, and Russian spies.”
“More than usual?”
“Absolutely. Everybody knows the Oval Office is full of venal, easily manipulated peacocks running the country like their own piggy bank. So the charm offensive arrives with suitcases full of money. This country’s going to spend the next twenty years unraveling all the intelligence lost and compromised these four years.”
“It’s sad,” Milo said.
“If only there were an organization that could do something about it,” Alan mused theatrically.
“Don’t start,” said Milo.
“Why not?”
“Because that’s not what we do.”
“But if we did we would do it best,” Alan said, smiling. His phone bleeped a Nexus message from his wife. “Pen wants to know if we can take you out for drinks.”
Milo shook his head. “My flight’s at eight-thirty.”
Alan nexted back a negative and said, “It’s all right; she’s just being polite.”
“You mean she doesn’t like me?”
“I guess you’ll have to have a drink with her to find out.”
Milo smiled, then thought a moment. “What do we know about Egorov besides the obvious?”
“I checked his file. Nothing really out of the ordinary. For a few years he was close to Putin, but four or five years ago he started pulling away. Which, I suppose, explains being posted to Algeria.”
“He was in Berlin before?”
“Sounds like a demotion to me,” Alan said.
The mystery of Egorov hung on Milo’s shoulders, but he knew from experience that he probably wouldn’t find an answer. And if he did, it would come years later, when an unrelated situation revealed the truth. Which was why the reference librarians and their enormous, deeply encrypted database were the backbone of the Library. They kept track of everything, cross-referencing and finding connections that Milo was just too human to be able to make.
“Do me a favor,” Milo said. “Get word to Berlin that I’d like to have a talk. I’ll have Kristin reroute my flight.”
“Because Egorov was stationed there?”
“And because he was friends with my father. So was Erika Schwartz. They were all the same generation.”
“And Erika’s been out of the picture three years.”
“Oskar Leintz isn’t.”
“Really?” Alan shook his head. “You hate that guy.”
“I work with you, don’t I?”
11
The Abdul Rahman Pazhwak conference room was a hermetically sealed space on the thirty-eighth floor of the UN with cracked wood paneling that had been installed in the midsixties. With the gathering darkness outside, the windows acted as mirrors until Alan lowered the blinds.
Collecting all twelve wasn’t unprecedented, but it was rare. Invariably a few patrons either bowed out or chose to join through video chat. Even the elusive Beatriz Almeida, assistant deputy to the Portuguese ambassador, sauntered in chatting quietly with Said Bensoussan. Milo approached them and welcomed Almeida, a small woman with a perpetual smile, then caught Said’s eye. Together, they stepped into the bland corridor.
“So?” Milo asked. “Egorov’s mistress.”
He frowned, rocking his head. “She spoke for two hours with your friend Colonel Rahmani, but I’m afraid nothing came of it.”
“What’s her name?”
Bensoussan hesitated, then said, “Gazala Mokrani. But it appears she knows nothing. Nor, I’m afraid, does Colonel Rahmani. He’s one of our better public servants, you understand, and Egorov’s death troubles him. The Russian acting consul has declined an invitation to enlighten us.”
“Did Gazala Mokrani explain why she and Egorov changed their daily pattern after Paris?”
“She only said it was Egorov’s wish. Otherwise, their liaisons remained the same. From what I understand, Ms. Mokrani is a singer. Worldly, a sophisticated woman. Rahmani believes she is telling the truth. I’m sorry I don’t have more information for you, Milo.”
By the time they returned to the room, everyone was seated and waiting. Bensoussan took his place beside Almeida, and Milo settled in a chair at the head of the table, Alan to his right.
Looking over his dozen patrons, he wondered again if he’d made a fatal mistake when, soon after taking over, he’d expanded the patron count from seven to twelve. At the time, he’d discovered too many holes in their globe-spanning intelligence network of forty-two librarians. They needed more staff, and a bigger support budget, but in a world where a global recession had been brought on by a toxic mix of fiscal and real estate malfeasance, demanding more from the seven his father had assembled—Germany, Luxembourg, Iceland, Kenya, Bangladesh, Ghana, and Portugal—was out of the question. So he’d gone hunting, and in consultation with the original patrons settled on five more—Algeria, South Korea, Lebanon, Botswana, and Chile.
That had solved the immediate budgeting problems, and with the larger staff he’d had to alter his father’s organization by creating a stable headquarters, the office in Escher Wyss, which was how he preferred it. He had no interest in the nomadic life his widowed father had led. But by nearly doubling the patrons he had doubled his political headaches. Building consensus among all twelve was like playing Whac-A-Mole, and the possibility of insurrection was an ever-present threat.
“Before we get started,” Milo said, “I wanted to share some information from Manila, where I recently came from.”
Eyes lit up around the table. It was rare when he shared intelligence with them as a group, which was why he’d chosen to do it now. To put them off their guard. The political unrest that he described to them would be of particular interest to Katarina Heinold, the German patron and the largest power at the table, whose country traded heavily with the Philippines. Yevgeny had brought on Germany at the start the way an American mall brings on a Macy’s to anchor the entire enterprise, and all the others noticed the way she leaned in and focused on Milo’s words.
When telling them about the incidents of piracy, he posed the same question he’d put to the UN lifer and his lover in Manila: Why would pirates sink vessels? The point of piracy was booty—how else did you pay for your enterprise? “This is what I find most disturbing. We know how to deal with piracy, but not a group that is willing to sacrifice both lives and profit.”
“Competition,” Almeida said. “It’s clearly for the benefit of competing transport companies.”
“Possible,” he said, “but no competing companies made a bid on their shipping lanes. Apparently, they’re all terrified of the same thing happening to them. They ended up being bought out by a company on the other side of the world, Oman.”
“Islamists,” Katarina Heinold suggested. “The Bangsamoro terrorists set off a bomb in Isulan two weeks ago. Or Abu Sayyaf.”
Milo was impressed by her breadth of knowledge but said, “No one has claimed responsibility.”
She accepted that with pursed lips, and as he wrapped up his disclosures Milo tried to read the patrons’ expressions. It was impossible, though, for these diplomats had spent their entire adult lives learning how to mas
k their feelings behind the shell of their faces. Some of them, he knew, were under significant pressure from home; some were at the end of their careers; others were eagerly vying for power on the home front. Some were backstabbers, others fatalists. Many were eyeing upcoming elections, populist challengers biting at their parties’ heels, and didn’t know if they would have a job next year. Which was another way of saying that whatever they did to him tonight was not personal; he just happened to be in their way.
“We hear you were in Algiers,” said Alfred Njenga, the Kenyan representative. “To meet Kirill Egorov?”
“The late Kirill Egorov,” Katarina Heinold corrected.
Milo wasn’t sure how they’d come across this information so quickly—either the Algerians or the Russians had let it out. He glanced over at Bensoussan, who gave him a very faint shrug, feigning ignorance.
“So, what was that about?” asked Beatriz Almeida, smiling.
“I don’t know,” Milo said. “He asked for a meeting, but we never got a chance to speak.”
Katarina Heinold looked over at Alfred Njenga, a subtle communication. Almeida looked at some papers she’d brought with her, while beside her Bridgette Tlhabi of Botswana checked her watch. That was when Elias Kanaan of Lebanon cleared his throat, brought his hands together on the shining surface of the table, and said, “We have gone through the new budget.”
Milo straightened in his chair, waiting for it. Waiting for the arguments over each item on the list—the travel expenses or the computer budget or the librarians’ per diems—preparing himself to fight for each euro.
But to Milo’s surprise, Beatriz Almeida said, “You’ll have your money.”
Though he should have felt relief, he didn’t, because her expression only hardened. Milo said, “Thank you,” and waited as she looked off to the side, at Hilmar Jonsson of Iceland sitting with Sanjida Thakur of Bangladesh, then back.
“There is, however, a caveat. We need to change the distribution method.”
Milo blinked. “Go on.”
The Last Tourist Page 9