No, not ownership. Protection. Because this guy wasn’t the Silicon Valley darling he pretended to be, and she had no idea.
Alan said, “I read a report that the Honduran military uses Nexus to communicate, so there’ll be no record of its atrocities.”
Powell surprised him by smiling. “There’s a rumor the Massive Brigade has started to use it, too. Going to blame us for their attacks?” He took a step closer, seeming incredibly confident. “Mr. Drummond, I’m just trying to level the playing field. Governments already have the technology to cover their tracks. Privacy should belong to everyone.”
Penelope’s features twisted, looking anguished, and she said, “People like Manuel over there don’t care about political considerations. They just want their family.”
“How do you know, honey?” Alan asked, now feeling inexplicably bitter. “Did you ask him?”
“No, I—”
“I’ll bet Manuel’s a pretty smart guy. He’s certainly politically savvy enough to know that showing up at a party in Manhattan makes better sense than being where he wants to be—back in Texas, looking for his family.”
A little grin played in the corner of Powell’s lips. “You know that, huh?”
“No, Gilbert, I don’t. But I’m going to find out.”
He looked around the room and had just spotted Manuel, still on his own, when his phone vibrated again. Heeler. He nodded apologetically to Penelope and turned away. “What’s up?” he said, but the music was too loud, her voice too quiet. He veered left through the crowd, toward the exit, and spotted Powell on his own now, frowning directly at him, the mask gone. Yes—there was the real Gilbert Powell, and Alan decided that when he came back he would have to face him; there was no other way.
He continued past the burly security guards out into the cold, where the columns and shadows dominated, lit from below.
“Heeler?”
A woman’s voice replied, “We’ve got an offer.”
Heeler’s phone but not Heeler. He felt a chill. “Who is this?”
“Cross Fifth, and we’ll talk.”
“Who?”
“Who do you think?”
“Where is the owner of that phone?” he said, suddenly worried for Heeler.
“She’s fine.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
Silence. Then: “Take a look across Fifth. I’ll wave to you. So you see I’m alone.”
Alan stepped from behind a column, looking down the wide stairs and across Fifth at the familiar park-view buildings he’d seen all his life. Occasional stragglers wandered by, but he didn’t see … there. Standing in a long coat, head uncovered under a streetlamp, her left hand raised in greeting. “Grace Foster,” he said.
In the silence, that cool tingle spread across his scalp again. He’d made a mistake, maybe, revealing that he knew who she was. Then he heard footsteps behind him and turned to find a beefy security guard approaching. “Sir?” the guard said.
“I’m with the party,” Alan said. He looked for Foster, but she was gone now. As his eyes focused on the other side of the road, he felt the guard come near, very near, so close that he felt his hot breath. When Alan began to turn to face him, he felt a sharp pinch in the middle of his back, behind his ribs, and only after he’d turned to look into the guard’s eyes did he realize he’d been knifed. His knee buckled. He raised his arms instinctively against the flash of the blade, but the guard was a big man, and too close already. A second jab caught him in the chest, running through to his lung, a searing, bright pain, and the guard’s free hand clamped his throat and shoved him against the column. It was all so fast that Alan couldn’t quite register that he was being killed. And by the time he did, it was too late.
40
When he looked out of the upstairs window at the picturesque field dotted with little mountain cottages leading straight into the base of Cardada Mountain, Milo thought that in spite of the cynicism and horror that humans visited on one another, there were places where you really could find peace. Like here, in a safe house north of Locarno, outside Avegno, in the Italian part of Switzerland.
“It is a great view,” Tina said behind him.
“Not tired of it yet?”
She put her hands on his shoulders. “I think even Stephanie’s warming to it.”
He grunted doubtfully. When he’d arrived last night, he’d listened to Stephanie’s complaints about the solitude. “That guy won’t let me go into town.”
“It won’t be for long,” he’d told her, even though he still had no idea how long it would be.
“Tell him to give me back my phone.”
“Who do you want to call?”
“I don’t make calls. No one makes calls anymore. I Nexus.”
“You can’t,” he’d told her seriously, trying to make himself heard. “Nexus most of all.”
Milo kissed his wife, and together they went down to the kitchen. Dalmatian had brewed a pot of American coffee before stepping out for a security check. Last night, the librarian had walked him through the area, pointing out places he considered hardest to defend. Up the street was a Catholic church that got traffic on Sundays.
They’d just poured their cups when Stephanie appeared, looking groggy. He kissed her forehead and watched her piece together a ham sandwich. She was quiet until after she took her first bite.
“I don’t get it,” she said, then sighed. “I mean, I get it. Someone tried to kill you. You’re trying to make sure they don’t come for us.”
“That’s right.”
“But who are they?”
“It’s hard to say.”
“Well, try saying,” she said. “Is it Russia or something like that? Is Vladimir Putin trying to get rid of you?”
“I don’t think so. I don’t even think it’s a country.”
“The mob?”
“Something like that,” he admitted, because it was as good a description as one could give of the sprawling network of companies that was threatening the Library. Not just the Library but everything it touched—other companies, countries, people just trying to live.
“Jesus, Dad.”
“Yeah.”
“And you’re going to put them in jail?”
That was an excellent question. “I don’t know yet.”
She took another bite. “Well, hurry up, okay?”
After coffee, Milo said his good-byes, checked in with Dalmatian, and drove south through winding roads to Via Cantonale, where he turned north to reach the A2, which brought him most of the way to Zürich. He called Milan and spoke with Noah, who had decided to look deeper into Kirill Egorov. “Last July, he went to the Aspen Security Forum.”
“They don’t usually invite Russians,” Milo said.
“They didn’t invite him,” Noah said. “He sat in the audience for a panel called ‘The New Reality of Private Security and Intelligence.’ The main guest was Anthony Halliwell.”
“Oh.”
“Maybe just another coincidence, but I did an image search. I’ve got five photos of them at the forum together. Drinking, talking. Different outfits, so different days. It smells.”
“It does,” Milo said. “Did you talk to Keller about it?”
“I will when he wakes up.”
Road work added a half hour to what should have been a three-hour drive, but he still reached the airport with twenty minutes to spare before his sister’s eleven-thirty flight landed. Carefully, he packed his SIG Sauer under his jacket and joined a sparse crowd of waiting families. Alexandra was the first to exit, and together they left the airport. As he merged onto the highway that would take them back to Milan, he took her through the expanse of connections that had been made in her absence.
“Jesus,” she said, sounding like Stephanie.
“We stay together now,” Milo said.
They had passed Locarno and were near the Italian border, only an hour from Milan, when Milo brought up the connections between Kirill Egorov and Mir
Gaz in Nigeria and Anthony Halliwell in Aspen. Alexandra went silent, watching the mountains pass in the bright afternoon light. Milo assumed she was on to thinking about other subjects when she turned and said, “What if?”
“What if what?”
She hesitated before speaking again. “What if Egorov actually was working with MirGaz and Northwell? Could that even make sense?”
Milo thought about it. “I don’t think so. Why sacrifice himself to get us Joseph Keller? Why contact me at all?”
“I don’t know,” she said, then looked at the mountains again. Eventually, she turned to him, eyes squinted in thought. “Egorov knew about the Library. Dad told him. And he knew you were running it.”
“Which is why he knew I could protect Keller,” Milo said. “And don’t forget that he kept the Library a secret all those years. Otherwise, we would’ve had trouble.”
“We have trouble now,” she said.
Silence fell again, but the idea kept revolving in his head, and he knew he had to follow it through. “Say he was working for Northwell. He calls me when I’m in Japan, going to meet Leticia. What’s Leticia working on?”
“The Nigerian money trail.”
“Which leads eventually to Tóuzī and to Northwell.”
Alexandra looked at him. “He thinks Leticia’s working for us. That she’s tracking the money trail for the Library. Which would explain why Grace Foster tries to hire her—right?”
“Maybe.”
She took a breath. “Okay, so Egorov calls you, thinking you’re investigating them. But—”
“Yes, but,” Milo cut in, feeling inexplicably irritated. No, not irritated: defensive. “But he smuggled Joseph Keller to Algiers rather than kill him. But he wants to give me Joseph Keller and a list that could be a blueprint for all of this. And he dies trying to do that.”
“But,” Alexandra said, her voice suddenly deeper, and when she didn’t go on he turned to look at her. Her mouth was moving, just a little, as if she were trying to form difficult words. Finally she turned to him. “But what if none of that is true?”
“What?”
“All those buts assume a lot. That the list Keller brought us is real. That Joseph Keller is the same Joseph Keller who stole the list. What if Egorov did kill Joseph Keller and replaced him with someone else, who he gave to you?”
Milo suddenly felt cold. His fingers tingled.
She said, “Keller’s list—have we gotten anything actionable from it?”
Milo opened his mouth, hesitant. “The one piece from it that was acted on—Diogo Moreira—the Portuguese found no evidence at all. Everything we’ve learned has come from Anna Usurov’s flash drive.”
“Milo,” she said, her voice quieter now. “How do we know that’s Joseph Keller? The Red Notices were taken down before we ever found him, so we didn’t have that to go by. Passport?”
“The passport he had on him,” he said, nodding. “And one more photograph. From the MirGaz website, and his Nexus account. Nothing else.”
For a moment, they only breathed loudly in the car, and Milo pressed down on the gas. Without having to be told, Alexandra took out her phone and made two calls. Neither Kristin nor Noah picked up.
“Kristin says the Library is Northwell’s biggest threat,” Milo said, his breaths shallow. “At least, it would be perceived as the biggest threat.”
“Which means they’ll do anything to bring us down.”
Forty minutes later, they typed the code to get inside the building, and in the foyer Milo took out his pistol as they quietly ascended to the third floor. At the door, he motioned for Alexandra to stay back as he typed the second code into the keypad and, pressed against the wall, reached around and pushed the door open. They waited, listening, as a nauseating stink wafted out; then Milo moved around the corner, pistol drawn, and entered.
Noah was in the main room, sprawled bloody across the big table. One of his index fingers, Milo noticed, had been cut off. Kristin was in the bathroom, folded inside the bathtub in a deep puddle of red. Milo crouched, staring at her frozen face for a long time, until Alexandra put a hand on his shoulder and quietly said, “Come look at this.”
He followed her back to the main room, trying and failing to avoid seeing Noah. Alexandra took him to the kitchen and opened up Kristin’s laptop computer. She had brought up the security footage from the street. There—from above, they saw the man they knew as Joseph Keller walking calmly out of their building. In his hand was Noah’s laptop. Following him out was a man neither recognized—tall, dark-skinned, and carrying a pistol he slipped beneath his heavy coat. The two men walked calmly down the street and out of view.
“You with me, Milo?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“He has our data. Encrypted, but we don’t know for how long. Our people are exposed.”
Milo rubbed his scalp with both hands, a feeling of vertigo coming over him. He remembered that horrible night a decade ago, when he’d watched on a computer monitor Tourists around the world being killed, one after the other, and he’d been powerless to stop it. Thirty-three murders, and all he could do was watch.
41
As the plane descended toward Zürich, Leticia listened with her eyes closed to Poitevin take out his phone and power it up. For most of the twelve-hour flight he’d slept like a baby, leaving her alone to puzzle over the intersection of Northwell, a Chinese developer, a Russian energy company, an Arab shipping conglomerate, and an American social media behemoth. She knew English bankers were involved, as was China’s Second Bureau. Jesus, but it was big.
Theories spun in her head, the tentacles of her imagination spreading across the atlas of what she knew. Nigeria, at least, she understood. Xin Zhu’s agent had pointed her to the answer: disrupting the CNPC’s Niger Chad pipeline by supporting Boko Haram. When she’d worked the mining deal in Nigeria in 2014, she’d researched energy on the continent and still remembered a list of the top ten oil producers. Number one? Nigeria. Numbers nine and ten were Chad and Cameroon—through which the Chinese pipeline would run to the sea.
The chaos of a well-funded terrorist organization would keep oil exploration at bay, but it would do more. She imagined Boko Haram, flush with money and successful in Borno State. Beyond the establishment of a caliphate, what would that mean? What would their leader, Abubakar Shekau, want to do next?
Expand.
Yes. Like all successful revolutionary leaders, he wouldn’t be satisfied with a slice of a single district in northern Nigeria. He would want to expand his organization’s footprint and secure his territory by growing right into Niger, Chad, and Cameroon. And then, to support a growing empire, he would want to get his hands on oil—the Agadem field in Niger would be within reach.
But wouldn’t Boko Haram oil be competition for MirGaz? No. Even if Abubakar Shekau got the pumps working and trucked the oil out, no one would buy it—no large market, at least. It wasn’t about benefiting MirGaz directly; it was about hurting China via the suffering of thousands of innocent Nigerians.
Everything was interconnected. The work of Tóuzī in Nigeria benefited MirGaz; MirGaz payments to the Philippines benefited Salid Logistics; influencers in four different countries put out Red Notices to find Joseph Keller to help MirGaz find their escaped employee; and Northwell was working hand in hand with Tóuzī as it expanded on Sakhalin Island and in western Nigeria, training new field agents they called Tourists.
But these details were just the tip of the iceberg, weren’t they? Everything under the surface was enormous and hidden because the system they’d established was secret. Or virtually secret. The facts she and the Library had discovered were the result of mistakes, and from what she could tell Northwell didn’t make many of those.
She opened her eyes, and the sun shone brightly through Poitevin’s open window. He was staring silently out of it, at the land rising to meet them. Swiss houses rolled underneath, and in the distance a runway was laid out to greet them. The wheels groaned
as they lowered in preparation, and in as few words as possible she explained her thoughts to him. When she finished, he chewed the inside of his cheek.
“Hundreds of stolen girls,” Poitevin said, “on the off chance that it’ll boost their bottom line?”
“They’re not girls to them. They’re numbers. They’re statistics. Trend lines.”
Poitevin, disgusted, shook his head as the plane touched down. Brakes squealed, and the cabin trembled. Then his phone beeped an incoming message. He read it, squinting; then his eyes widened. He looked at her. “Check your phone.”
“Why?” she asked as she powered hers up.
“Just check it.”
The screen came up quickly, and it vibrated a new message. A single sentence from an unknown number: Your book is on hold. She showed it to Poitevin, who had received the same message. “I’ve never gotten this before,” he said.
“What does it mean?”
“It means we disappear.”
“What do you mean, disappear?”
His cheeks were flushed now, and he began to disassemble his phone. “It means security has been compromised. It means we’ve all been exposed.”
She, too, began to disassemble her phone. Milo Fucking Weaver. She’d been part of his crew for a grand total of … what? A week? And already it had gone to hell.
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
“Get far away from here.”
“Japan?”
He thought a moment, then shook his head. “Not for a while. Easier to move around in Europe.”
This was all going too fast. “But … how do you reestablish contact later?”
“He didn’t tell you?”
“We had other things to worry about.”
He nodded. “I’ll write down the IP address for you. You don’t come in until the recall message appears.”
The Last Tourist Page 23