She knew what this sounded like to someone like Milo: a shockingly naïve proposition. His expression didn’t make her think she was wrong. “How would you do that?”
“Did you know that during Goodluck Jonathan’s administration twenty billion dollars of government money went missing?”
“That’s a lot.”
“For you and me, yes. But for an economy like Nigeria’s? It’s ridiculous. So I began with the cabinet and worked my way down. Gathered evidence. I charted where their money came from, which accounts it was laundered through, and whose pockets it went into. And that’s when I stumbled across it.”
Leticia got up, walked to the kitchenette, took a bottle of water from a cabinet, and returned, cracking the top open. Milo watched her the whole distance, and when she returned to her chair she said, “This world we live in—we put border checks everywhere for people, but money? Money is the freest thing that exists. It can vanish and reappear anywhere on the planet like that.” She snapped her fingers. “And in the space of forty-eight hours one cabinet member’s account rose to a million dollars and then fell to twenty dollars.”
“Cashed out?”
“Yeah. Three days before the Chibok attack.”
Milo’s face twisted; he was clearly confused. “Wait—are you saying…?”
She held up a finger. “I didn’t know, did I? So I followed the money in reverse. It had been laundered through a Senegalese shipping company, a Malaysian textile firm, and a Chinese economic development company.”
“How did you track all these accounts?”
“Friends. I have friends.”
“But this,” Milo said, sounding pained. “Look, the Library’s good, but even with all our resources it takes months for us to track these sorts of things, and we’re not always successful. But you have a few friends who can pull this off?”
“The difference,” she told him, “is that my friends, even the ones working for Maastricht, aren’t worried about a little breaking and entering.” She winked and gave him a smile to make him feel better. “But this did take years, Milo. I started looking in 2014, after the Chibok girls were taken. Didn’t put it together until last year. In July 2017, I was working on the other side of the world when my friends told me that over a two-day period, that same bank account had been filled again and emptied.”
“And you thought…”
“I didn’t know. But if it was true…?” She shook her head. “I dropped everything and went. But I was too late.” She hesitated, then went silent, remembering landing at Murtala Muhammed International and finding the news already full of another Boko Haram attack. A hundred and twenty girls, gone. She felt the emotion building in her, just as it had then, and cleared her throat.
“So you knew,” Milo said, sinking deeper into his chair, his expression bleak. Maybe he wasn’t a bad egg after all.
“I spoke with the local cops,” she went on. “I even went out into the bush for a week, talking to villagers who were too afraid to answer my questions. Then I came back to town and ran into a guy, Karim Saleem. Moroccan, or so he said. Accent? British, and not just from school. I’d seen him three years earlier, in Chibok. Worked for some NGO—Literacy Across the World. LAW. Focus on education in the third world. Over drinks he told me he’d been studying the effect of unrest on education trends, which was adorable, but utter bullshit. I didn’t believe anything he told me—it sounded scripted. So I lifted his wallet and found three names on three different credit cards. I had Maastricht run the names. There was nothing on the name he used with me, but another one—Walid Turay—came up in a police report from Thailand. He’d been arrested as the fence for an armed robbery of—get this—land title deeds from a distant relative of the king.”
“Strange.”
“Stranger still, his outbound flight from Nigeria had been paid for by a company called Tóuzī.”
“What’s Tóuzī?”
“The Chinese developer that laundered the Boko Haram money. I also had the name of the person who authorized that million-dollar transfer—a man named Liu Wei.”
“Are you honestly telling me some Chinese company was paying Boko Haram to kidnap these kids?”
She opened her hands. “I didn’t know. That’s why I was in Wakkanai—to find out. Tóuzī’s headquartered in Shanghai, but Liu Wei was working on a big project on Sakhalin Island. He has Japanese family in Wakkanai that he visits once a month. I didn’t want to deal with Russian security in Sakhalin, not alone, so I was going to wait in Japan and hold him down and ask him some questions.”
“Did he show up?”
She shook her head. “I’ll lay odds he’s back in Shanghai by now.”
Milo frowned at her. “So what happened?”
She looked squarely at Milo, licked her teeth behind her lips, and told him the rest of the story. Mr. and Mrs. Gary Young. Fleeing to Hong Kong. Fighting back. To remove any doubt, she unbuttoned her shirt and slipped it off her left shoulder to show him the bandage on her arm. “I got nicked.” Then she described fleeing to Amsterdam, and that call with Joan—or, to Milo, Jane.
Milo looked stunned. He rubbed his hands on his thighs, finally asking, “So you came to us for help?”
This was getting tiring. “Really, Milo. You’ve got to do something about your ego. I came to Zürich looking for the bitch. She told me she was flying into Zürich from the States, and we made a date. I had no intention of meeting on her terms, so I tracked all the flights coming into Zürich from the US and stood around waiting. I saw you first, watched you stumble around, buy a bottle of water, and pass out. Honestly? Seeing you pissed me off—I was there to deal with Joan, but there you were, dropping like a drunken fly. To help you, I was going to have to break cover. And then … well, you know the story. There she was, crouching over you, something in her hand. A needle, maybe? I don’t know. But I wasn’t going to wait to find out. I launched. She ran off. I bolted when I saw the cops coming. Afterward, I saw her in the parking lot. She’d been picked up by a white van. It was two car-lengths away, in the other lane, and she rolled down her window and pointed at me like this.” Leticia made a finger-pistol and pointed it at Milo.
He looked like he had finally woken up. She hoped he appreciated what she’d done by changing her plans, and what kind of a mess she was in now.
He said, “This woman—Joan, or Jane—she’s after both of us.”
“Yes.”
“I wasn’t attacked until I took Joseph Keller into safekeeping and shared names from his list with our patrons. To protect, one assumes, MirGaz.”
That sounded right to her, so she gave him the solution: “Give him up.”
Anger flashed through Milo’s face. “What?”
“Alexandra says his list isn’t helping anyone, and the guy doesn’t know enough to be of any use. Give him to the Swiss; let him be their problem. Won’t help me, but it might get them off your back.”
He shook his head. “He’ll be dead inside of a week.”
“It’s not your problem. Your problem is keeping your people alive, not him.”
“Enough, Leticia.”
She shrugged, leaned back, and crossed her legs. “You know what we need? Some of those Chinese guns.”
He frowned, still looking a little pissed. “What?”
“Those plastic guns you told me about. Something untraceable. Something to bring through security. I’m sick of leaving my hardware behind.”
“I don’t—” he began, then paused, seeming confused. “I told you about those?”
“The one-shot wonders from Beijing? Sure.”
He rubbed his forehead, and it gave her a measure of satisfaction to hear him say, “You really must have gotten me drunk.”
“Hell yeah I did.”
After a moment, he nodded and leaned back, accepting his incompetence. “So. We know why they’re after me. But what about you?”
Leticia rubbed her lip, letting the air go out of the room. “I didn’t know before,
but I do now.”
“How?”
“At the airport. The man at the wheel of Joan’s van was Karim Saleem, or Walid Turay. They’ve been on me since Nigeria.”
Milo rubbed his hands through his graying hair, as if something terrible had occurred to him. “No,” he said.
“What, no?”
“Boko Haram in Nigeria, Tóuzī in China, MirGaz—they all connect to a single CIA department. How?”
“Elephant,” Leticia said.
He looked at her, waiting for an explanation.
“We’re each looking at parts of the same elephant.”
“But what is the elephant?”
Leticia didn’t have an answer, and neither did he. Then Milo’s phone buzzed on the coffee table. He answered it with a “Weaver,” then listened for a full minute. His shoulders sank, and he closed his eyes. “Jesus.” Whatever he had heard was seriously bad news. He pinched the bridge of his nose and finally said, “Thanks. Let me know how it goes.”
When he hung up, he pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. “What is it?” she asked.
“Leonberger, one of our librarians, is dead.”
“What is with these names?”
He ignored her. “But he did his job. He sent us a flash drive. They’re decrypting it now.”
“What flash drive?”
“Anna Usurov’s.”
Leticia got up to pour herself another coffee—she was going to need it.
28
Five days later, Alan stared out the window of the Acela Express, watching the landscape of New York turn into New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland until it reached DC, flipping idly through a discarded Washington Post. It was the third time he’d taken this route in the past two weeks. First time, he’d gone to meet Helen, his CIA contact, to find out who in the US government had sent Interpol the Red Notice request for Joseph Keller; once she’d agreed to that, he slipped in the more dangerous question about the Department of Tourism. She’d pouted at him as they walked together through Dumbarton Oaks park, not far from her Georgetown apartment, and told him that he’d be better off not dredging up ghosts. “I’m asking if it really is a ghost, Helen.”
“What would make you ask that?”
“Things that are hard to explain. Bumps in the night.”
“You’ve been listening to ghost stories.”
He didn’t deny it, just said, “Can you check on it?”
His second visit had been with Penelope, when she’d insisted on going to the Museum of African American History and Culture because she’d heard there would be an exhibit on James Baldwin. When they arrived, though, it turned out that it wasn’t an exhibit but a discussion of Baldwin’s only children’s book, Little Man, Little Man, with a panel including the actor LeVar Burton. As Penelope sat listening, Alan had wandered through the museum, eyeing artifacts of slavery and oppression, feeling the echo of all that horror in the news he’d been reading lately: black people killed by police, black neighborhoods losing access to the voting booth, white supremacists crawling out of the woodwork and staging torchlight parades. His mood darkened.
Bad days in America and, always, the cloud that hung over all human endeavor: climate change. As world temperatures crept steadily upward, people remained resolutely distracted by the crimes humans committed against one another. Everyone was dancing to the wrong tune, and dancing toward a cliff.
And now he was back on the Acela, alone this time, sipping an antioxidant smoothie he’d picked up at the Penn Station Jamba Juice. Helen had given him no preview of what she would say, only a note in the drafts folder of their shared Hotmail account: Monday 1345 Lincoln.
Yes, even this—even the possibility of a resurrected Department of Tourism—was nothing in the face of global disaster. But it was the only thing that, for now, he could have an effect on.
As the train was nearing the station, he looked down at the Post in his hands to see a headline on the fifth page: PORTUGAL ARRESTS SUSPECTED RUSSIAN SPY. He began to read, then cursed silently to himself. Against their instructions, the Portuguese had picked up Diogo Moreira. Fucking Beatriz Almeida. Milo, hiding out in Milan, was going to blow his top.
It was a little after one when he tossed his empty cup and hustled out of Union Station for the twenty-five-minute walk down chilly Massachusetts Avenue to Lincoln Park. There had been a time when he would have balked at the idea of going by foot, but he’d been younger and stupider back then; self-destructive, too. A heart attack turned that around, as did Penelope, who cut through his self-pity with a line in the sand: Cut it out, or I’m gone.
He waited by the statue of Mary McLeod Bethune handing a copy of her educational legacy to two children. Farther down the park, Abraham Lincoln stood holding the Emancipation Proclamation, as if with a simple piece of paper America could be cured.
“Good, you’re early,” he heard, and turned to find Helen smiling at him, her blond hair curved around her face and flowing into the raised collar of her black trench coat.
“You are, too.”
“How’s Pen?”
“Saving immigrants. It keeps her busy.”
“Good for her,” Helen said, and he joined her slow walk toward the sixteenth president. “The request for the Red Notice,” she told him, “started at Justice. You’ve heard of Gilbert Powell, I believe?”
“Founder-of-Nexus Gilbert Powell? What does he have to do with it?”
“Well, Powell plays his senator like a fiddle. My source says after a boozy lunch with Powell, the senior congressman from Kentucky came out all cylinders firing, demanding a talk with Justice.”
“What was his reasoning?”
“National security.”
“So the request was pushed through by Gilbert Powell.”
“Yeah, I know. Doesn’t make sense to me, either.” She opened her hands. “But that’s all I got.”
Alan wasn’t sure what to make of this revelation, so he just said, “Weird,” and, “The other thing?”
“The ghost?”
“Yeah.”
Helen rocked her head. “That took longer than expected.”
“But you found it?”
“Indeed I did.”
“So it does still exist?”
“It does not.”
He was taken aback by her unequivocal reply. “What did you find?”
“A story,” she said. “Remember 2008?”
Alan did. Alan would never forget 2008. “It was the end of Tourism.”
“It was also an election year,” she reminded him. “Did you vote?”
He hadn’t—he’d been too far gone for that—but said, “Of course.”
“A lot of people did, and a young politician with a weird name won. Democrats got control of both houses. There was a lot of talk during the campaign of the crimes of the previous administration. Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. State-sponsored torture. Outing CIA officer Valerie Plame. The Democratic base wanted Republicans behind bars. This ring a bell?”
“Vaguely.”
“Well, imagine the feeling in the White House in the weeks before inauguration. They didn’t know what the new administration would do. So they started cleaning house. They sent people into all the departments to find dirty secrets and either shred or move them, so the Dems couldn’t bring them to a grand jury.”
“And among those dirty secrets…”
“Tourism. Exactly. It had been around for decades, but all the administration worried about was what it had done during their eight years. As you know, not all of it was pretty. And the way it ended—that’s a story no one wanted out. So it was decided to erase Tourism from the archives.”
“Erase erase?”
“Erase from the server. Hard copies put into cold storage, off-site.”
“Where off-site?”
“There’s probably no more than five who know where. I’m not one of them.”
“Do you know who those five people are?”
&nb
sp; “I’m not even one of the people who can find that out.”
Alan understood. “When were the records erased?”
“Sometime in December 2008. But the point is that there’s no way in hell anyone has revamped the department. Not without the records. Without them—without the blueprint for putting it together—you can’t create the department. You can create something, but that would just be a shadow of Tourism, which had been honed over half a century to perfection.”
Not perfect enough, Alan thought as they reached Abraham Lincoln.
“You going to tell me?” she asked. When he didn’t answer, she said, “Those things that are hard to explain—do they really look like Tourism?”
He almost told her that, yes, they did look like Tourism, and, further, it called itself Tourism and even used the go-codes of the original Tourists—Leticia had verified that. He almost told her all of this but stopped himself. “It’s doubtful,” he said. “Just wanted to be sure.”
Helen looked like she didn’t believe him. “It’s a good thing,” she said with a shrug.
“What?”
“Imagine what the current administration would do if they had those files.”
“Or if those files ended up in Moscow,” he said.
She let out a short, sharp ha!, then winked at him. “Take care of yourself, Alan.”
29
“Give me a few days,” Milo said into the phone, sitting on a box of printer paper in a back closet of the Milan safe house.
“What does it matter if you’re there or here?” Tina asked. She and Stephanie were only two hours away at a safe house across the Swiss border, in the mountains just north of Locarno. It was tempting to get in the car and, at the very least, spend the day with them, but he could hardly do that and still demand Kristin, Noah, and Joseph Keller remain trapped in this claustrophobic apartment.
The Last Tourist Page 17