The Last Tourist

by Olen Steinhauer

  Leticia didn’t like this at all. Just when she felt like she was close to understanding things, the rug had been pulled out from under her. All those years she’d spent on her own, she hadn’t made a dent in the mystery of those girls in Borno, and now real answers were within reach.

  “You know where he is, right?” she asked. When he frowned at her, she said, “Milo. There’s only one place he’ll be.”

  “Yes,” he said, “but I’m going in the opposite direction. I suggest you do the same.”

  “That’s how we get picked off one at a time.”

  Poitevin shook his head. “I’m following my orders.”

  When they left the airport, she regretted not talking him into coming with her; despite his lousy tradecraft she enjoyed Poitevin’s company. Or maybe it wasn’t him but company in general. She’d forgotten how much she enjoyed the back-and-forth of human interaction. People didn’t suck quite as badly as she generally believed.

  Before leaving the airport, she bought a new SIM card and plugged it into her phone, then used her Wanda Kumalu credit card and South African driver’s license to rent a BMW. It was the one ID she hadn’t blown yet. Maybe.

  42

  “Someone’s coming,” Dalmatian said, trotting down the stairs. “Just over the hill.”

  Milo looked across the kitchen table at Tina, whose eyes were damp and red. He’d made a mistake telling her about Kristin and Noah. She’d known the reference librarians, had made dinner for them on occasion, and on other occasions they’d gotten drunk together in the living room on Hadlaubstrasse, and now she’d been asked to accept their murders with a swiftness that she wasn’t built for. Better to just walk in, say, “We have to leave now,” and get into the details later. He’d tried that, of course, but failed. Tina was done being the uninformed one; it was a role that had never suited her. And here she was, sitting frozen at the table, dealing with the consequences of knowledge.

  “Who?”

  Dalmatian checked his old Makarov pistol. “No idea.”

  Milo grabbed his SIG Sauer from the living room, and out front he and Dalmatian waited on either side of the wide gravel driveway until the front end of a BMW slowly rolled forward. Sun glinted off the windshield, then passed, and he could see Leticia sitting inside. He lowered his gun and nodded at Dalmatian, who approached, still wary, as Leticia parked.

  “So?” she asked as she opened her door and got out. “What the hell’s going on?”

  When Milo told her about the betrayal, she raised her head to look down at him, as if she were going to dispute the story, but said, “So what does he have on that computer?”

  “We don’t know everything Noah kept on there. Certainly our codes and legends—that’s the first thing he would look for. Maybe safe houses. It’s why I sent everyone away.”

  “Library files?”

  “It can get to the database, but without the passcodes no one can access it.”

  “How good is the encryption?”

  Milo opened his hands. “The best we could buy.”

  “Just a matter of time, then,” she said, and rubbed her temple, clearly frustrated. “Still, though. One asshole, and you throw everything away?”

  “Do you remember 2008?” Milo asked, and she straightened. Of course she did. She was lucky to have survived. They both were. “I’m not letting that happen again,” he told her.

  As they entered the cottage, Alexandra was trotting down the stairs, her face red as sunburn. She nodded at Leticia; Leticia nodded back. In the kitchen, Milo used Kristin’s laptop to pull up the security footage from Milan. At 11:12 a.m., the tall, dark-skinned man approached their street-side door, entered a code, and walked into the building. Twenty minutes later, he exited with Keller—but a different Keller than Milo had known. Not irritable or scared. Relaxed, satisfied, at peace.

  “That’s Gary Young,” Leticia said, pointing at the other man. “From Wakkanai and Hong Kong.”

  When Dalmatian hurried into the kitchen, no one looked at him until he pointedly said, “We have to go.” They looked up, and at the phone he was holding out. On its screen was Milo’s face, the old photo he’d used for his UNESCO documents, and his name. Then: Wanted by China, Russia, United Kingdom, United States. Pasted at the corner of his picture was the Interpol logo in red above the words RED NOTICE.

  But Leticia didn’t want to be hurried. She settled into a chair, then slowly took them through what she’d learned in China. She described the interconnectedness of the companies they’d been tracking, and seemed surprised that no one in the room disagreed with her. They’d all reached the same conclusions by different paths. “Now that we know who they are,” she said, “how do we take them down?”

  It was almost quaint, remembering his state of mind only a few weeks ago, his fear of turning the Library into an active-measures organization. Now that it was their only option, he’d waited too long. There was no Library to activate.

  “What about the patrons?” Alexandra asked.

  “We don’t know who we can trust. Portugal is a no, and maybe Germany, too. I don’t know about Said Bensoussan.”

  “Any contact is going to be a risk,” Dalmatian pointed out.

  Tina was standing in the doorway, quietly listening. How long had she been there? He didn’t know. She said, “There’s nothing you can do, is there?”

  Milo considered this seriously, then shook his head. “Not by ourselves.”

  “No,” Leticia said, stiffening. “We get your family safe, and then we go after him,” she said, nodding at Gary Young, frozen on the computer screen. “Or we go after Grace Foster. There are a lot of people we can get our hands on.”

  Alexandra disagreed. “What makes you think any of these people are the head of the snake? They built it like this on purpose; the organization is diffuse. One link won’t bring down the edifice.”

  “Then we go after two, then three. Until it does start to crack.”

  “I’m with her,” said Dalmatian. “Enough hiding.”

  Milo leaned against a counter, because the exhaustion—the real exhaustion, the psychological exhaustion—was taking hold. Every time they took a step forward, they were knocked back five steps. Things might be clearer, but not better, not for any of them. He wondered what the point was of moving forward. He’d disbanded the Library, and by doing that had made his family even less safe.

  His pocket vibrated; it was his encrypted phone. He took it out and checked the screen: Alan’s number. Even Alan had known. Back in New York, he had pestered Milo to make the Library more active—we would do it best. Everyone had understood this, but not him. He’d been led by his fears, and that fault was going to be their downfall. But when he answered the phone, Alan wasn’t on the other end. Penelope was, and she was crying.

  PART THREE

  MERGERS AND ACQUISITIONS

  FRIDAY, JANUARY 18, TO FRIDAY, JANUARY 25, 2019

  1

  In those first moments after he stopped talking, as the ferry groaned around us and we rocked our way toward the Spanish coast, I had trouble putting it all together. This wasn’t the first time he’d stopped. Hours ago we’d broken for a meal that Leticia brought from the galley—at which point I realized the seasickness I’d been feeling was only hunger. But while eating ravenously I made a conscious choice not to judge anything until the story had reached its conclusion. Now it had, or at least it seemed as if it had, Milo falling silent and reaching for a bottle of water.

  “So you went to Laayoune,” I said.

  “Yes,” he answered. “Eventually.” He sipped at his water and looked expectantly at me.

  So there we were; I had my story.

  Could I believe him? Maybe, yes. Because while our industry is full of talented storytellers, few dig into such detail, such intricate interconnection, and it struck me that if Milo Weaver really was spinning a lie, such a convincing delivery could only mean that I was in the presence of a true psychopath. And that, at least at this point, di
dn’t seem right.

  So, yes, I did believe him, which led to the next question: What did I take from the story? Were there other ways to interpret the data he’d presented, some less insidious analysis he’d been too narrow-minded to see? Maybe he was attributing everything to one organization when it was really a Venn diagram of separate actors who overlapped just enough to look like a single entity. I’d seen that in studies of war-torn areas: The simple among us would attribute all bombings to a single party, when that was seldom the case.

  But Milo had a through-line, the enigmatic Grace Foster. She had appeared to Leticia and to Milo, and her marital connection to Northwell was stronger than circumstantial. It was certainly good enough to hang a hat on.

  “And in Laayoune you hid,” I said. “For three months. Without even your family. Then you called me.”

  “Not you, Abdul. I had no idea who you were. I still don’t.”

  Who was I? In the grand scheme of all this, I was a nobody. A stenographer to the stars. And so far out of my league that I wondered how I was still alive. Luck, and a good dose of protection by Milo Weaver and Leticia Jones.

  “Why, though?” I asked. “What good does it do for you to get your story to the Agency?”

  Milo scratched the back of his neck, and Leticia got up, saying, “Excellent question, Abdul. Milo?” Without waiting for an answer, she pulled open the heavy door and looked outside the cabin. “Spain ho.”

  Milo got up, and I followed suit. The three of us watched the Spanish shoreline grow in the distance, a mess of beaches and ships and buildings and harbors in the evening light. She turned back to us. “I’m going to keep an eye out as we pull in.”

  “Good idea,” Milo said.

  She departed, and I went back to check the recorder. Fifteen hours of story. Jesus.

  “Unlike her,” Milo said, following me back inside and pushing the door shut, “I don’t think CIA is a cesspool of cynicism. I think it’s an organization full of decent, if flawed, human beings, with no more bad apples than any other place. I think that if they understand that there’s an intelligence organization representing only business interests, weaponized far beyond the usual muddle of private contractors, one that exists entirely in the shadows with zero oversight—I think in that case your employer will have no choice but to act against it.”

  “You want us to help you bring it down.”

  “Bring it down. Expose it. Cripple it. Whatever works. Think about it, Abdul. No one knows it exists, yet it’s active all over the globe.”

  “Like the Library,” I said.

  He opened his hands like a patient father dealing with a know-it-all middle schooler. “And not like it. Ask those drowned Filipino sailors, the slaughtered Nigerian schoolteachers and their students. Ask Collins. Ask Kristin, Noah, and Alan. Ask Leonberger. Ask Griffon.” He shook his head, momentarily emotional, then kept going. “Look, we got it wrong, and we kept getting it wrong. All of us. After 1990, we thought history as we knew it was over. The last big competing superpower had imploded, leaving only the US to oversee the final move into a liberal democratic world order. Not everyone agreed. Rwanda, Yugoslavia, Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq … yes, superpowers were done, but they had been replaced by a hundred brush fires, too many for one country to put out. Factionalism. So we all started adjusting our policies to deal with this. But history kept shifting. Russia and China rose and Europe began to fracture, which brought us back to the start: Superpowers were back.”

  “Yes,” I said. “That’s how we look at it, too.”

  “Because we don’t think the way they do,” Milo said. “The rest of us—the Agency, Pentagon, State, even the Library—we’re taught to see the world in the old terms. Ethnic groups. Nation-states. Languages. But those aren’t the source of power anymore. Money ignores borders. Corporations are the new nation-states. It’s why your own analysts never saw any of this. Nigeria, the Philippines, Nexus, what’s going on in China—they don’t fit into your models of the world. You couldn’t look at these events and trace them to a single country, because no countries benefit. Only the members of this consortium.”

  He was right, of course. It would have never occurred to us to look to a Chinese development firm to explain Boko Haram. It was like pointillism: Stand too close, and it makes no sense. Step far enough back, and you can see it. Maybe.

  “We’ve missed this for a decade,” he said. “Ever since Grace Foster gave the Tourism files to her ex-husband. I don’t know whose idea it was, and it doesn’t matter, but Halliwell and Foster went to Davos together in 2009 for the World Economic Forum. That same year the CEOs of IfW, Nexus, MirGaz, and Salid Logistics also attended. Each year since, none of them have missed the Forum.”

  I scratched the back of my head, imagining snowcapped mountains and a lot of whisky. I stood up again, but now my legs felt tingly. Weak. I said, “Okay. What do you want?”

  “I want your help. The Agency’s.”

  “Do you even trust the Agency?”

  “I trust it to follow its mandate. If a private army is ignoring national sovereignty, causing mayhem around the world and, yes, cutting into American profits overseas—don’t tell me that’s not a national security issue.”

  I could see that, but I could also imagine how Paul, Mel, and Sally would react to this story. “They don’t trust you.”

  “And you, Abdul? Do you trust me?”

  “No,” I said without hesitation.

  “What about the story I’ve told you?”

  I blinked at him, unsure how to answer. Did I believe it all? There were parts that I found hard to swallow, but overall … “I’m still digesting it,” I told him.

  He nodded curtly. “Fair enough.”

  “Do you have a plan?”

  He said, “There’s only one place for us now. We’re going to Davos. The Forum starts in four days. That’s why I told you we were running out of time.”

  “And then?”

  “We’re still putting it together.”

  “So you don’t know what you’re going to do.”

  “We have ideas,” he said.

  “But you don’t trust the Agency enough to tell me.”

  “Let’s just say it hasn’t been finalized yet.” He leaned closer and tapped the recorder. “Who will you give this to?”

  “My boss, Paul Williams. He’ll pass it on to Mel and Sally—I don’t know their surnames. The ones who sent me to you.”

  “And what do you think? Will they act? Or will they bury it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He worried over my answer, then checked his watch. He rifled through Leticia’s bag until he found a satellite phone. “Do you want to call home?”

  “What?”

  “Your wife. Tell her you’re okay. That you’re coming home. We’re putting you on a flight out of Madrid for tomorrow morning. Eleven a.m.”

  I blinked, surprised. Though he’d told me as much, I couldn’t imagine stepping onto a plane and getting back to my family. “Yeah,” I said. “Thanks.”

  He powered up the phone and handed it to me, and while I dialed he went to the door and stepped outside to give me privacy. Laura picked up on the third ring—it was seven in the evening where I was, one in the afternoon in DC.

  “Hello?” she asked warily, not recognizing the number.

  “Laura, it’s me.”

  “You back?”

  “No. I’ll get on a plane in the morning. Should be home late tomorrow.”

  “Okay,” she said, and yawned, and I realized that only three days had passed since I’d seen her last. In her mind, I was calling after a series of meetings with powerful men, probably sitting in a hotel with room service and a few drinks in me. But then, in the silence, she seemed to pick up on something. “You all right, Abdul?”

  “Sure,” I said, then said it again: “Sure. Just wanted to let you know. How’s the monster?”

  “Doesn’t like being back at school.”

  “I bet,
” I said, then realized I was weeping. I didn’t know why—or, I didn’t have a specific reason. It was just the convergence of everything. I took a deep breath to distract from the sound and said, “All right. See you tomorrow. Love you.”

  “You, too,” she said, then hung up.

  The ship groaned, and I stared at the satellite phone in my hand, drying my eyes and thinking of my brother. About a year before he died, he told me, “There is nothing special about the powerful. They’re only a bunch of assholes trying to get one up on each other.”

  “That’s why we have checks and balances,” I countered.

  “Did you read that in a book?” he asked, grinning. He’d just gotten back from Yemen, where Houthi Shia insurgents, he’d had to admit to his clients, had made foreign investment a nonstarter. “That’s the problem with education—you’re taught that the systems we have in place actually work. What they don’t admit is that everything is falling apart in slow motion.”

  We were in a DC bar where my co-workers often met after hours, and I even saw a couple of them by the window, glancing curiously at the big, tough-looking man I was drinking with. “In Yemen, sure,” I said.

  “I’m not talking about Yemen. I’m talking about right here—the West. Each year a little more washes away. The tide of history eats at it. Just look around. Open your eyes.”

  It was my job to look around, to see threats where no one else saw them. It was Haroun’s job, too; we just had different employers. “My eyes are open,” I told him. “I see reports you’ll never see.”

  “The Agency?” he asked. “What do you think you’re doing there? Your job isn’t to push back the tide. Your job is to make sure no one notices what’s going on.”

  I was growing insulted by his condescension; over the years his expansive travel itineraries had made him vain. “That’s bullshit, Haroun.”

  He flashed that charming grin and took a swig of beer. “Listen, brother. In places like Yemen, I see the West’s future. I can handle it because the future isn’t really my problem. I don’t have kids. But the plebes out there? If they saw what I see, they would lose their shit—total panic. Social norms would be a thing of the past. Laws just words on paper. And you, in the Agency, would have to throw up your hands and give up. Which is why you hide the truth. I don’t blame you—everybody does it: the government, the media, the church, the mosque. Every mommy and daddy in the world. Because without the illusion of security there is no national security. The most important thing you can do is make sure no one sees the world for what it is.”